From left: 1. Sara at Universitetshuset, Lund University. f/2.8, 1/80 s, ISO 800. 2. Sofia in the Botanical Garden. f/2.8, 1/400 s, ISO 200. 3. Claire in stair case. f/3.5, 1/320 s, ISO 400. 1 and 2 were taken with the Nikon AF Nikkor 50 mm 1:8D lens, and 3 with the Nikon DX AF-S Nikkor 18-135 mm 1:3.5-5.6G ED lens at 20 mm. All rights reserved.
Why?
Because you're left with no other choice. Back in the film-days serious photographers who wanted a large degree of control photographed b/w film and developed it themselves in their own darkroom. The processes for developing colour film are often too complicated to perform in your own basement, and therefore demanded a high degree of automation, which usually only could be offered in the film manufacturer's own labs. Take it or leave it! The development process for colour film didn't offer nearly as many parameters to tweak as b/w film did to achieve the wanted result - as it were in the days before photoshop and digital cameras. Colour film was always the choice for amateurs and photographers who got published in colourful magazines.
Still today, there exist situations that demand that you convert your colour photo into b/w. But unless you've got a perfectly fine photo and want to mimic a certain style, there is no reason to convert your colour picture into the marvellous shades of grey. Colour does have a greater impact on our subconscious than shapes have, for evolutionary reasons. So if you want an eye-catching photo, keep those colours! However, some times the light didn't offer any attractive colours, or some colour is just too distracting, or you wish to move the eye away from a particular colour to a shape instead. You're simply left with no other choice! What you'll do when you convert to b/w, is that you simplify the photo to emphasise the shapes and contrasts between dark and bright.
If it benefits your composition - go b/w! Otherwise, just don't! B/w photography is perhaps most suited for portraits, still lifes and abstracts, where shapes and shadow play are important. Unless your name is Ansel Adams, you shouldn't shoot landscapes in b/w.
The Photos
The photos have all in common that they are portraits and the models all have natural red hair. Nothing particular disadvantageous with red hair, I've just photographed a lot of red-haired people lately.
1. I made this one b/w because I wanted to highlight the door post, so the indirect attention will be drawn to the model. Also to emphasise the shadow over her face, so it seems more tender with her closed eyes and facial expression. The entire point of this photo is the interplay between shadow and light. The model was the former tv-hostess Sara.
2. This one was made b/w because I wanted to draw attention away from her face to her amazing hair. The beautiful profile is just a bonus. She didn't wear any make-up, which made it difficult to reduce the amount of red pigment in post-process on her chilly cheeks without making it all seem rather unnatural, also the shadow from the branches masks them rather well now. Especially with her red hair, the red cheeks would have been the second thing you've spotted. The model was Sofia.
3. The lines! The Lines! This one is all about the lines. Look at the line-like girl. Look at the hand rail. Look at the lines on the wall. Look at the lines in the stair case. Look at the line-like beam of light. The model was Claire, and she isn't as thin as she seems, because she twisted her body and I added some pincushion lens distortion to it to get even crazier lines. Any colour would have distracted you from the lines.
Technik
Shoot in colour! B/w conversions are made in the computer, not in camera! A colour picture has (in theory) millions (256^3) of colours. A b/w picture has 256 shades of grey. The later in your process you do your conversion, the more you may manipulate your photo (without bad results). A modern DSLR can capture either 12 or 14 bits of colour (I.e. 4096 or 16386 individual colours) so the loss isn't that great. The colours red, green and blue will, in the best of all worlds, be captured in 256 shades individually, to produce a composite that'll be the observed colour. Instead of three colours, you'll only use one when you go b/w. If you want a more dense colours spectrum, shoot film or get a medium format camera!
To make the conversions from colour to b/w is a bit tricky to get them to look good. I use layers in GIMP, because the results looks good. I create two duplicate layers of the image. On one of them I invert the colour values, creating something that looks like a negative. I set that one to either "overlay" (10-40%, usually 20%), or "grain extract" (10-20%, usually 20%). The other layer I do nothing to, and put it as "overlay" (20-50%, usually 20 % if the other was "overlay", and usually 50% if it was "grain extract"), if it looks too dark I then put this layer as "screen" (10-40%). Adjust the layers to get the right levels of darkness and lightness. Merge the layers and desaturate (method: luminance). If the preview looks good I press OK, otherwise go back and adjust the layers. Then I go to "levels" and usually punch in something like this: Input 10 - 240, gamma 0.90. Output 15 - 245. Adjust accordingly (never let the output be lower than 10 for b/w). This usually gives me the b/w film feeling. In Photoshop and Lightroom the b/w conversion is more depended on how you treat each individual colour - I find that tedious!
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