Well, it seems a few people took up the last challenge, so we’ll try another one this week.

When shooting a monochrome picture, most digital photographers shoot colour first (because that’s what the camera’s sensor picks up), and convert to monochrome later. It’s tempting, in your graphics package, to just press ‘convert to greyscale’ but this really doesn’t give a good result - real black and white film has a different sensitivity to different colours, and it’s this we need to achieve in post-processing. This tutorial at Luminous Landscape will explain everything you need to know.

But that’s not all, is it? Nope.

When shooting colour pictures, you can use ‘colour contrast’ to separate your subject from its background. A blue ball on a red table will show up brightly and boldly. Unfortunately, in monochrome, the two objects may be exactly the same shade. The tutorial above explains how you can go some way to turning colour contrast into luminosity contrast (brightness) by taking selected channels from your source image.

On the whole, though, what makes a good monochrome picture are lighting and texture. The texture has to be present to make an interesting object, and the lighting has to be right to show up that texture. Look at the moon, for example. During a full moon, the light from the sun points directly at the moon - you can’t see a whole lot of detail because there are few shadows cast. During a less-than-full moon, the light glances off the side of craters and casts deep shadows into them - you see a much greater contrast.

Your challenge this week, should you choose to accept it, is to take a photo (or several) with the intention of converting it to black and white. Of course, you can make the conversion if you wish, but the real work goes into finding a suitable subject.

I haven’t done a lot myself, but the idea for the challenge came when I saw this signpost:

Good luck!