May 15, 2020

The Beauty of Black and White Wedding Photography

Amare Weddings  is a professional Byron Bay and Gold Coast wedding photographer and videographer. We share new inspirations and blogs every week, so ensure you don’t miss out on our next blog.

The beauty of Black and White Wedding Photography

I love black and white images, especially black and white documentary wedding photography and when it’s done well I actually prefer it over color.

Ted Grant said, “When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”

The truth is that having your wedding photographs in black and white makes viewers view the photographs very differently. For instance, a black and white theme makes your photograph appear compositionally stronger or more dramatic. Thus, encouraging the viewers to take a deeper look into the narrative and purpose of the photographs. 

In most color wedding photographs, the colorful background, varying light sources, and colorful dresses are always distracting and would take away the focus of viewers – this is one of the beauties of black and white wedding photography. 

Here are other reasons why black and white wedding photography is beautiful:

It Blocks Out Riot of Colors

Normally, all wedding parties feature color accents – from the decoration of the venue, dressing of the guests, cake, to the beautiful decoration flowers. The Asian wedding theme is particularly known for the riot of colors.

However, there are moments in wedding parties that have deeper and weightier meaning at their core, especially for the couples and their families.

Catching these most significant and sincere moments in black and white reveals the true meaning of the moments.

Black & White is Beautiful

Everybody, especially the couple, looks good in black and white – because black and white is beautiful.

In the harsh Australian sunshine black and white images can be hard to pull off well. Good black and white images need contrast of light and dark. In good black and white wedding photography the blacks should be black and the whites white.  You want a complete tonal range between the two shades to create stunning images.

Unattractive color photographs can be converted to black and white photographs to cover up any displeasing look, especially when the defect is as a result of bad shadows or dull colors.

You will appreciate the beauty of black and white photography better when you are hosting your wedding in a venue with a few windows or poor overhead lighting. 

byron bay wedding photographer

It Focuses the Viewers

With black and white photography, your viewers can focus solely on perspective, texture, shadows, shapes, emotions, and expression without the distraction from colors.

Though the photographer can set and arrange the subjects for a beautiful photo angle, the background can sometimes make the photograph messy, and black and white can help draw attention away from this.

Final Note

By now, you must have seen the beauty of black and white photography,  how awesome would a black and white themed wedding be?  With all that being said we often produce around 15-20 percent of our wedding photos into black and white. We use our skills and knowledge to use black and white for the images benefit rather than just putting an image in black and white because it’s easy. Editing black and white photos is an art and not every image needs to be in black and white.  As a Byron Bay and Gold Coast wedding photographer we love processing black and white images so if you’re looking for great black and white wedding photography then make sure you drop us a message.