Changing Black and White styles – Wedding Photographer Cardiff

I thought in this blog I would look at how my style has changed over the last few years and look at something that I may offer as my new Black and white style. I doubt it though as I love what I have and by the time I decide to change it will probably be something entirely different. The photos below are from various weddings and with a range of inside / outside and sunny/overcast. I even have one lit with my off camera flashes. The top 3 photos are from Kat and Elliot’s wedding at Pencoed House – I loved their wedding and their images were used by an album company to advertise for a few years. The next 2 are from Chloe and Will’s wedding in Bath. That was a great day and a gorgeous couple too. Then we have Clare and Dave (also at Pencoed House) and finally a recent wedding of Hannah and Mark at Rosedew Farm in February.

The photographs below show the evolution of a / my photography.

Photo 1: The original straight out of camera shot.

Photo 2: My original Black and White that I used for many years from starting using Lightroom as my editing tool. It is black and classical looking. I was trying at the time to emulate Jeff Ascough – whose work was very good and that I really loved. It seems very harsh compared to my work now. It was very black and white where as now I live it to be more muted.

Photo 3: This is how my style looks now … as you can see it is more muted and a lot greyer than photo 2. It has what we call ‘crushed’ blacks and this gives a milky look to the black areas. This is done in the tone curve of Lightroom and it’s a feel I really like. It gives a lighter feeling to the photo and seems to work in most situations. That’s the difficulty of finding a black and white (or colour – especially colour) ‘preset’ – it has to work in many situations and sometimes it works and sometimes it looks terrible and I’m pretty sure that’s not the look I am going for.

Photo 4: This is a look into the future. This is a preset that I have not yet used and may well do. Its based on the preset used for photo 3 but I have added a little colour to it to make it more than just a black and white. I am not sold on it but what do you think?

I will hopefully do this for my colour work and as you can imagine that has many more possibilities to change and look great. By the same token, it can also have more chance of looking horrible. But then I try not to make my work horrible if I can help it!