Black and White Photography: Filters (Jakob)

By placing a filter over the lens you can dramatically change the tone so a colour becomes darker or lighter grey. You may have seen a black & white landscape photograph with the dark blue sky turning almost black. The chances are this will have been taken with a red filter over the lens.
Filters allow certain wavelengths of light through and block others from reaching the film. The filter will let through it's own colour so the grey tone of subjects with the same colour as the filter will be lighter and the tones of subjects with contrasting colours will become darker.


The following filters are commonly used in black & white photography: Yellow, Orange, Red, Blue and Green, and the visual below shows what happens to the tones when the filters are used.



Original colour photograph for reference shot on a blue/grey background.






Photograph taken in black & white with no filters used.
Notice tones such as orange and light pink become almost identical so do blue and red.



Adding a yellow filter introduces a subtle change to to yellows, oranges and red which become slightly lighter.





The orange filter lightens oranges and reds and darkens the blue and green pencils.
It's the red filter that has a serious effect on tones. Notice the pink and orange are now almost white while the deep red displays similar values to the original orange, while the blue and green have become very dark.


Since we are featuring several black and white shots in our film, this research is seriously relevant. We are using a yellow dress based on the assumption that it will appear white when pictured in black and white on the camera we will use, but if that doesn't come out perfectly then we can use a yellow filter on the camera lens to achieve the desired effect.

(source: www.ephotozone.com)