Black and White Photographs of Skye, Harris and Lewis

This section contains a selection of my Black and White photographs, mainly taken on the Isle of Skye and other Scottish hebridean Islands, such as Harris, Lewis and Rum. I originally started my photographic life as a Black and White photographer since it was more accessible and all the great photographers of the past such, as Ansell Adams, produced their most famous and iconic photographs using Black and White media. I used to use Ilford film and develop my 35mm film using a small tank and then print the photographs using, a now ancient, Black and White enlarger on which I learned how to do some of the key post editing techniques that I still use today, such as dodging and burning. I have to admit that I find it much more straightforward and accurate to implement these techniques today in the digital world with the tremendous software that is available.

I eventually moved on from Black and White photography to exlusively working with colour transparencies and printing the transparencies, in a manner very similar to Black and White processing, although with stricter temperature control, using a Jobo tank system, a Durst colour enlarger and Cibachrome colour paper. I never gave black and white photographs a second thought again until I moved over to digital photography when I found that shooting in black in white mode, or switching between colour and balck and white in camera and post production, could give very illuminating insights into the tonality of a photograph and what adjustments were needed to produce a better overall composition.

When I started switching between colour and Black and White post production I began to realise that a selection of photographs, particularly those with high contrast, worked better in many ways in Black and White so I started to print a selection of such photos and had a dedicated Black and White section in An t-Eilean gallery and now in my Print Room. My Black and White prints started to become popular with visitors to the gallery and indeed some visitors focussed exclusively on my Black and White work perhpas because ‘retro’ is becoming fashionable again today. I have therefore reproduced a selection of these photographs here and I hope to add more Black and White landscape photographs to this gallery soon.