Emotion in Monochrome Photography: Capturing Mood and Feeling Without Color

^{Photo by Stephen Harker via iStock}

Black and white photography, grayscale photography, and other labels of monochrome photography have been around since the advent of photography itself. Many photographers prefer monochrome photography for their art images because it allows for a lot of control over the mood and feeling of the image.

Capturing or creating emotion is part of the appeal of monochrome photography for many photographers working in it. I love it myself. Part of what drew me into landscape photography in the first place was admiring and trying to emulate the work of masters in black and white photography, such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

Let me take you into the world of monochrome photography to show you how to explore all it offers for creating or capturing mood, feeling, and emotion in your photographic art. Plus, I’ll highlight how to finish the process with printing options.

What is Monochrome Photography?

^{Photo by Christopher Roth via iStock}

What is monochrome photography? Mono = 1, chrome = color. Therefore, monochrome means something is one color. Photographically and in other art forms, monochrome can also refer to a dominant color of the image or different hues or intensities of one color.

Monochrome photography can be a descriptor for a huge gamut of image styles. Black and white photography is perhaps the most common style when talking about monochrome photography (more on this in a moment).

Studying the Old Masters

^{Photo by Elerium via iStock}

The roots of monochrome photography go way back before there ever was photography. Chiaroscuro is a painting style or technique that may help us understand how to capture or create emotion in monochrome photography.

Chiaroscuro is another portmanteau combining two Italian words this time, “chiaro” for light and “scuro” for dark. It refers to the artistic use of gradients of light and dark. Traditionally, paintings made with the chiaroscuro technique have a dark, serious, somewhat somber mood.

One only has to look at Rembrandt's paintings of people as examples of this technique. In fact, there is a lighting configuration labeled Rembrandt lighting that takes the principles of chiaroscuro and applies them specifically to portrait lighting.

Obviously, this means you can learn a lot about monochrome photography ideas by studying the paintings of Rembrandt, Rubens, and Velázquez, among others. I won’t go too deep into all of this because it can take up several semesters of courses within a fine arts degree.

Some other old masters to study are closer to the modern era, photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, and André Kertész. In fact, I like to point out that the Zone System, perfected by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer, applies to digital photography.

Check out some of our Photography Talk articles about the Zone System, portrait lighting, and black-and-white photography for some great ideas that can be applied to capturing and creating mood and emotion in monochrome photography.

Is Monochrome Photography Always Black and White?

^{Photo by Zeynep Ozdelice via iStock}

One of the things that gets a little confusing when talking about monochrome photography is that it doesn’t only mean black and white photography. Grayscale photography is another word for black and white. Grayscale photography uses the colors of black and white and all of the gray tones in between, so Black and White photography is monochrome photography.

Any color can be used for monochrome photography. You may already be familiar with sepia tone as an “old-timey” style of photography. It’s basically a black-and-white image but with the image printed on a warm, coffee or tea toned substrate instead of plain white photo paper.

Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and copper prints are all methods that count as monochrome photography since they are basically B&W images printed on different types of metals, each one with its own overall color tone.

Other colors can be used, too. A night vision scope has a green hue, and an architectural blueprint is a print made with a process using, you guessed it, blue ink.

Controlling Emotion in Monochrome Photography

^{Photo by Wirestock via iStock}

Using all of these ideas of monochrome photography will allow us to either capture or create emotion or mood.

You may have noticed that I’ve used both “create” and “capture” when talking about mood in monochrome photography. I separate the two because there are times when all we have to do is use our knowledge of adjusting exposure to capture a mood.

Exposing for high-key images captures a light, airy, almost whimsical mood, while low-key image captures can evoke a more serious feeling, even melancholy or depression.

We can create the mood or emotion by deliberately setting up the subject or the lighting configuration for high-key, low-key, low-contrast, or high-contrast images. A high-contrast image can invoke a mood of stress but also can cause a feeling of importance.

If we go into other colors of monochrome photography besides grayscale and related styles, we can add different moods, emotions, or feelings to our images.

For example, a green tint can create a feeling of mystery or intrigue because we are conditioned to see green-tinted photos as the results come from night vision optics. A photo with an overall red tint could make us feel danger, anger, or possibly even romance, depending on what hue of red and whether the image is high key or low key.

Some other color casts that can influence emotion or mood include blue or green for peacefulness or being back to nature. Purple or related shades, such as lilac, could create an air of fantasy or an alien feel. Yellow can portray joy or happiness.

Monochrome Photography - The Entire Process Matters

^{Photo by OGphoto via iStock}

Just as the old masters of painting, Rembrandt and Rubens, or the old masters of Black and White photography, Adams and Weston, did with their respective arts, part of the process of monochrome imagery is the final display medium.

Rembrandt used treated canvas and hand-mixed inks to control the mood of his paintings; Ansel Adams used the Zone System from exposing the film to exposing and developing his photo paper, all with the intent of displaying to others exactly the feeling they wanted to portray.

With digital monochrome photography, the metal printing process is the perfect display medium. HD metal prints from Shiny Prints are the highest quality metal prints we can get for our images, whether regular styles of photography, black and white photography, or the interesting and moody monochrome photography images we’re discussing now.

I like the HD Metal Prints from Shiny Prints because they use the best aluminum panels in the industry, ChromaLuxe, make them with the dye sublimation process, with several different surface finishes, and the only thing they make is metal prints, so they put all of their effort and quality into that style of photographic printing.

Dye sublimation on a metal substrate is durable, virtually damage-proof (disclaimer: not entirely damage-proof), and gives amazingly detailed and RICH images. When made from regular color image files, an HD metal print is beautiful; an HD metal print of our monochrome photography can be absolutely mind-blowing.

Going Beyond Color

^{Photo by hallojulie via iStock}

Black and White photography is an amazing artform, capable of delivering photographic images full of whatever feeling or emotion we want to put into them. B&W is not the only style of monochrome photography that we can use for creating or capturing moods within our photography.

Whatever color we use for our monochrome photography, we have all sorts of options for creating and capturing mood, emotion, and feeling in our fine art photography.