50 shades of wildlife: Nature in black and white (Part two)

This is the second part of a two part series on photographing wildlife in black and white. You can find part one, from last week, here. 

Background briefing on black and white

Your background is always a key consideration in wildlife photography, but when you’re showcasing wildlife subjects in black and white it can be the make-or-break element in your shot.

Because black and white is all about strong contrast we tend to lean towards backgrounds that are fairly clean, simple and uncluttered for most of our black and white shots; so little gets in the way of that bold juxtaposition between the animal and the surrounding space in the frame.

When weighing up good backgrounds for black and white we tend to gravitate to open and empty landscapes with a fairly limited colour palette. Think in terms of even-toned backdrops like deserts, snowscapes, grasslands, wide plains and so on. These can all be the perfect blank canvas for mono wildlife shots.

Such backdrops don’t have to be totally featureless of course, and sometimes it’s a huge boon for your composition if there’s a stand-alone tree, rock formation, tracery of leaves or a network of branches you can use for visual balance and graphic interest; or just simply to make a point about scale in your picture.

Some of our favourite backgrounds for black and white are extremely minimal indeed. We like the way that detail as well as colour can be subtracted to powerful effect in black and white images, and we often opt to make use of empty ‘negative’ space in the frame when looking to add extra impact.

A vast expanse of empty sky (blue and cloudless or overcast), a large, still body of water or a broad area of dense, dark shadow can be used much as a studio background to really make a wildlife subject ‘pop’ in mono.

It can be intensely powerful sometimes simply to showcase your subject against a very pale or very dark background – fully exploiting the extreme contrasts of black and white.

Shadow play – exploiting the light in black and white

Overcast conditions lend themselves well to black and white and this can be particularly helpful where you’re looking to pick out lots of fur and feather detail. We frequently exploit this potential on days when the sun has gone AWOL, but we’d hate to give the impression black and white’s only for when the light’s a bit flat.

There are lots of other, more interesting lighting conditions that can help make your subjects sing out when they’re converted to black and white. Stormy skies and dark brooding clouds in bright sun, for example, can be great for ramping up the tension in a black and white wildlife shot – but remember to try to match the mood of the sky to your subject. A fearsome predator could really benefit from a dramatic backdrop like this – a graceful antelope might not.

We’re big fans of backlighting, and love harnessing its potential in our black and white images. Shooting into the light allows us to be extreme and turn our subjects into silhouettes like children’s paper cut-outs or shadow puppets.

Dust particles and water droplets created when our subjects are in motion can totally transform images when shot backlit and converted to black and white. The results can be quite magical as the dust and water splashes register like diamonds or twinkling stars against an inky black backdrop.

We’ll also have black and white somewhere in mind when there’s strong raking sunlight hitting our subjects. Side lighting casts beautiful deep shadows that sculpt and enhance textures, for example, a crinkly-skinned elephant, the rugged scales of a crocodile or the mud-covered horns of a wallowing rhino. You can accentuate these effects even further in black and white, underexposing a shot a little perhaps to bring the effect out more and increasing the contrast at the editing stage.

And when the sun’s high and casting rich, dark shadows that repeat and echo the shape of a subject keep in mind that images that might not work at all in colour might just look really dramatic converted to black and white. But don’t forget to add a dab of negative exposure compensation to make all those rich shadows jump out in your end result.

About the authors: Ann & Steve Toon are a UK-based, husband and wife team of award-winning, professional photographers with a specialist interest in the wildlife and wild places of southern Africa where they spend several months each year photographing and running photographic safaris.

Their work is published in a wide range of magazines and national newspapers, both in the UK and abroad, and they are reprepresented by several leading photographic libraries. They've also written three books, two on wildlife photography and one on rhinos. You can see more of their work on their website at toonwildlife.com and follow their African adventures on on their 'Beat about the Bush' blog at toonphotoblog.com.