What lens, or lenses woud you recommend for B&W

eddieitman · Joined: 12 Apr 2011 Posts: 1247 Location: United Kingdom

Well i Love to do B+W photography I use Photoshop to convert and i was thinking to myself that i find some of the images i take always seem to convert really well from certain glass, So my question is what lenses would you recommend for this.
It may well be a lens that is actually considered very poor for colour, but adds real character to the image for a B+W
Subjects would be Landscapes and Portraits
Here are a few samples of images that where terrible taken with the kit lens from the Sony but worked really well in B+W. I discarded the images in colour and only used them to play around in.

themoleman342 · Expire: 2013-01-24

I always found the Jupiter 9 does particularly well with b&w.

I think characteristic lenses in general would serve you well no matter if the pictures had color or not.

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9097 Location: Houston, Texas

I generally like lenses that exhibit above average contrast for B&W, but that's just my personal preferences. One of the reasons why I've always liked my Yashica Mats for B&W is because their lenses are quite contrasty.

Because of this I tend to prefer primes over zooms, and often slower primes more than faster ones. One of my favorite primes for B&W is the old Leitz M39 collapsible Elmar 5cm f/3.5. But unless you're shooting with a NEX or a u4/3, you won't be able to use it with a digicam.

LucisPictor · Expire: 2013-12-03

Since you do PP anyway, just take the lens you like the best.
If you shoot on b&w film, a yellow filter is more important than the lens. Wink

RioRico · Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 5:19 pm Post subject:

I have been shooting my Pentax K20D in B&W lately, mostly with internal (digital) orange filter, although I sometimes change that in PP. I sometimes wish to replicate the earliest photographic emulsions, which only saw 'actinic' (UV-violet-blue) light. Thus I may use the internal blue filter, or add a blue or violet-blue physical filter. Old blue-ish CC (color correction) filters are cheap and plentiful.

What lenses to use? I prefer older primes without modern corrections: triplets and tessars and their derivatives, which often seem to be made by Meyer, Enna, Steinheil, Isco, the Russians. But also my Takumars. And my few old Nikkors aren't bad either. But my newer AF zooms seem to me to be over-corrected, over-compromised, and just lack the dimensionality of the simpler designs. I also like using enlarger and copy and projector lenses in bellows; some old Kodak Anastigmats deliver nicely.

iangreenhalgh1 · Expire: 2014-01-07

Some examples of BW shots taken with my Petri CC 1.8/55. I did a fair bit of PP on the portrait but the last pic of the fence all I did was turn to BW and increase the contrast slightly.

Seele · Joined: 17 Apr 2009 Posts: 741 Location: Sydney Australia

Just as a matter of interest from a film user's point of view: often a lens which performs well on colour would look terrible on black-and-white. With digital, I feel that you can explore older lenses as they tend to flatten contrast somewhat, which can work well within the dynamic range the digital sensor can handle. With film it is of course controllable to a large extant by tailoring processing.

sir_c · Joined: 07 Dec 2008 Posts: 67 Location: Netherlands

Personally I think the Leica Elmarit-R 135/2.8 is excellent for B/W conversions. You hardly need to do any PP on those pictures.

f8andbethere · Joined: 16 May 2011 Posts: 17

Here's one shot with my Tak 50/1.4 (8 element) on a Panasonic G1

f2/ISO100

martinsmith99 · Expire: 2013-11-18

Any lens and use Silver Efex plug in.

BRunner · Joined: 29 Jul 2009 Posts: 705 Location: Czech Republic

Attila · Expire: 2025-11-18

estudleon · Joined: 15 May 2008 Posts: 3754 Location: Argentina

Orio · Expire: 2012-12-04

Firstly, it is important to state a truth that has not been stated yet:

Most of the optical defects that would harm a colour photo:

- poor resolvance
- corner sharpness fall-off
- corner lightness fall-off
- flares
- ghosts
- spherical aberration
- geometry distortions

will also hurt a B&W photo.
Only the chromatic aberration can be regarded as pretty much harmless for B&W, unless it is so strong that it becomes noticeable also in greyscale.

As for "lens character" only (choice amongst lenses that have no -or small amount of- optical defects of the above list), it may depend on what kind of B&W are you planning to do, if digital grayscale or true (chemical) black-and-white, but in general, I feel that the two should be approached in the same way.

Digital grayscale is done 100% in post-processing (with the exception of one super expensive digital back that records directly in grayscale).
The common conception is that since 100% of digital grayscale is post-production, the lens matters little or none and the only one thing to do while shooting is to stay within the (small) dynamic range of the digital file.

Based on my personal experience, I personally disagree from the above concept, for the following reason: grayscale conversion - a successful one - requires a number of editing steps and a "violence" of editing that is never done for colour images, and for which the digital photography was not really conceived from the start.
For example, to obtain some expressive contrasted sky starting from the dull digital file that DSLRs and most autofocus lenses of today produce, you really need to "rape" the red and blue channel of the digital file, to an extent that would never be used for a colour photograph. This, especially if done unproperly (for instance, while using the sRGB colour space that is standard in most DSLRs cameras), can produce files that show horrible artifacts for instance on gradient areas (sky) or bad noise-signal performance in underexposed areas.

My personal recommendations for digital grayscale are what follows:

- if you shoot digital with the pre-determined purpose of doing only grayscale, then do it from the beginning: use colour filters as if you were shooting film.
This will create a base digital file that will require much less brutalization in the post-production than a normal, dull colour image. Less PP will result in better image quality.

- expose for your final result and do not only mind the histogram, but mind also the aesthetical result that you want to obtain. This depends exclusively from your taste and experience. Grayscale, like black and white, has no colours (doh!), but it has tones, and tones are a matter of contrast.
This means that in most of your grayscale photos, you will not really mind to lose some black areas, and also a little of white areas. What counts is how well the main subject and the surrounding elements show differences of tones effectively. If to make your subject stand out requires you to sacrifice details in the extremes, you will do it: to do artistic grayscale, you need to get out of the HDR-extremistic philosophy of "save every detail in the image".
This given, what will be best? To shoot for a dull original base file, that will require a lot of stretching of histogram to obtain the grayscale that you want? Or, to shoot aware and metering for the final result, so that you lose detail where you know you are going to lost it, but preserve and optimize it where it will count, giving you a much cleaner result in the areas that count? I go for the second option. And for this reason, I am not afraid of using contrasty lenses when shooting digital for grayscale. My Contax and Leica lenses are perfect for that, but so will any other lens that has good contrast and produces lively results already in the colour file. These images are a lot less pain to PP to obtain a good grayscale. Of course, the back side of the coin is that it's easier to make unrecoverable mistakes if you shoot careless of taking a good exposure.

- The last considerations above take us to the main point: for grayscale (and for B&W) you need to read the scene in your mind before shooting, at least coarsely. You can do that with a hand meter, or you can do that simply from visual experience using the famous "zones". Basically you need to look for the darkest parts in your scene, notice if there are important details, take note if you can see important visual differences between "totally dark" and "very dark but readable" parts, then look for the high lights (usually sky, snow, reflecting walls and clothes, etc) and do the same type of evaluation, then decide what you can lose from each end without compromising the image: this will give you the contrast range of your image (measured in number of zones to be used). You then examine your main subject and decide where it should fall (for example, human faces of white race should fall in zone 6, that is, 1 stop higher than 18% grey). That will be your optimal point. With that point in mind, you should optimize your dynamic range to reach only the useful zones, letting go the zones that you have decided to lose. This will probably result in a somehow clipped histogram, but if you did things properly, the central part of your histogram will display a much richer and tonally differentiated result, because what you be confined in, say, 1/3rd of the dynamic range of a dull original colour file, is now expanded to, say, 90% of the dynamic range of the digital file, thus retaining much more information where it really counts.

Chemical B&W is actually quite the same concept as digital grayscale, but it gives you waaaay much more power in the darkroom to obtain a great B&W image than any digital software can do. This because with the combination of
- choice of film
- choice of developer
- choice of developing times
- choice of printing paper
- choice of print chemicals
you have a full range of expressive options, that a simple colour slider in a digital software can not in any way obtain.

With chemical B&W, you need to be aware also of the properties of the B&W film when shooting. It is important to develop an experience trying out as many diverse films as possible. Then choose one, or maximum two, and stay with them all the time, because of the five big variables of chemical B&W listed above, the more you can more or less standardize, the better you will be able to predict in advance what will be the results of all your choices.
Chemical B&W is an adventure, if you go for it... have fun! After a while in the real darkroom, developing your films and, especially, printing your photos, processing software will look crap to you. You will still use it, but it will look crap. I do use it, but nevertheless it does look crap to me, grayscale-wise.
_

IAZA · Joined: 16 Apr 2010 Posts: 2587 Location: Indonesia

Very nice explanation Orio.
Brunner...thanks for link
Not really concern in BW yet now, but thanks for tips

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9097 Location: Houston, Texas

That's a very good essay, Orio. Is there some place here at the forum where really good advice like this can be "stickied"? Maybe the Techniques subforum?

Pancolart · Expire: 2013-11-18

Superbly written Orio! A collection of your Essays could well find its place in a printed form.

I find Takumars as very good choice for BW. You can dismiss their chroma noise and yellowing glass thus all that remain is great Smile

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