Changing to black and white

[skipgribble]

Completely new, with a new camera Cannon EOS. Does anyone know how to change to black and white pictures? When would one take black and white pictures?

[RecurrentNerve]

You can take black and whites in pretty much any situation. Remember that for many years b&w was the only kind of photography!

Black and white emphasises the contrast in a shot so scenes with strong natural contrast work well. B&W portraits can be especially evocative; there's a quote that says 'In colour you photograph the clothes, in black and white you photograph the person'.

You don't mention what model of EOS you have so I can't give you specifics on how to set it to black and white, but it will be something fairly simple in the menus. You may be able to customise the black and white further in-camera to process it with different 'filters' - the classic filter with black and white is yellow, which gives the effect of boosting the contrast and giving you a good 'punchy' shot. B&W straight out of the camera can be a bit flat and grey. I suggest you have a look at your manual. Happy black and whiting!

[dcclark]

The easiest way to get a B&W photo which looks decent, is to shoot in color. Then convert it to black and white in Photoshop, Gimp, etc. Use the "channel mixer", which lets you mix the red, green, and blue channels together to form a nice punchy black and white image.