My little project: black and white animal pics
So, I got this urge the other day. I was looking at some photos and thought, you know, animal pictures always seem to be about the bright colors, the fur, the feathers. What if I stripped all that away? Just black and white. See what happens. Decided to give it a whirl.
Didn’t do anything fancy. Just grabbed my phone, really. Sometimes I use my old digital camera, the one collecting dust, but the phone was easier. I went out to the local park first. Lots of squirrels, some birds. Then I remembered the neighbor’s cat often hangs out in our yard. Perfect.
Getting the shots was, well, tricky. Animals move. A lot. Especially squirrels. Birds fly off just when you get focused. The cat was a bit more cooperative, thankfully, just lounging around. I took a whole load of pictures, figuring quantity might lead to some quality. Snapped away whenever something looked remotely interesting – the way the light hit the fur, a funny expression, whatever.
Back inside, I transferred the pictures to my laptop. Time to sift through. Honestly, most were rubbish. Blurry, badly framed, the usual. But I wasn’t looking for perfect color photos. I started looking for different things:
- Good shapes and lines.
- Interesting textures (fur, feathers, bark the squirrel was on).
- Strong contrast between light and shadow.
I picked out maybe ten or fifteen that looked promising. Then I opened them up in a basic photo editor I have. Nothing complicated, just the standard stuff.
Turning them black and white
First step was obvious: just hit the black and white conversion button. Instant change. But most looked a bit… dull. Flat. Like something was missing, even though the point was to remove color.
So, I started playing around. This is where the real work happened. I messed with the contrast slider quite a bit. Pushing it up really made the difference between the darks and lights pop. Made the images feel stronger.
Then I fiddled with brightness. Sometimes bringing it down made it moodier. Other times, lifting it slightly helped show details in the shadows.
I also adjusted the highlights and shadows separately on some. Bringing down highlights stopped the bright spots from being just white blobs. Lifting shadows helped see into the darker fur without making the whole picture washed out. You just nudge things bit by bit until it feels right. There’s no magic formula, you just gotta eyeball it.
For a couple of photos, I cropped them tighter. Get rid of distracting stuff in the background. Focus right on the animal, maybe just its eyes or the texture of its coat. Like with the cat, cropping in close on its face made it look really intense in black and white.
The result? Pretty cool, actually. Got about five or six shots I really liked. The black and white definitely changes how you see them. You notice the patterns, the textures, the form, way more. The squirrel’s bushy tail looked amazing, and the cat’s eyes seemed even more piercing without the green color.
It felt like a good exercise. Made me look at things differently, both when taking the picture and when editing. It’s less about capturing exactly what was there, and more about capturing a feeling, I guess. Stripping away color sometimes gets you closer to the subject’s essence. Yeah, I enjoyed this little experiment. Might do more.
