Black and white...not shades of gray

Mixing it up a little tonight. 365 days is a lot of days to post photos and I thought it might be fun to try something new. I thought of this a while ago and since today taking photos didn't really fit into the schedule, it seemed like the time to do it since I could use some from the archives. ;) I suppose you could call this a quick lesson in good vs. bad black and whites. I do not claim to be an expert in black and white conversions, but I can tell good from bad. This wasn't always true. I mean I could always look at a great black and white and know that it looked great, but I never knew why it looked different than when I would upload my own photos and hit a magic button in some generic editing software that claimed to make my photo black and white. What realy happened is that they turned gray. Most of these simple black and white editing tools basically just suck the color out of photos and make them flat, or two dimensional. They just have no depth and are boring. Good black and whites should have just that...black and white. Often they may also include some brown, purple or even pinkish tones. They should have contrast and depth. Why am I telling you this? Maybe so you, like me, will never look at black and whites the same and every time you see a "bad" one your eye will twitch a little because it does annoy me that I am so critical of them now. Maybe so that you can turn your photos into fantastic black and whites yourself...all you really need is a basic version of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Probably more than anything it is because there are many, many "photographers" out there now. Many people (myself included) have decided that they were going to purchase their own DSLR cameras and start taking their own pictures. Many of them (again, myself included) found a passion in photography and are now taking them for others. Unfortunately some of them don't know the basics yet and I consider this to be one of them. When I see gray photos on a "professional" photography site or facebook page I immediately think they haven't put the time or effort into really learning about photography yet. Here are some examples of bad vs. good. The first is the chapel where Chad and I were married and the second is a recent 365 post.