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B&W shooting

Smaller image files... that's about it. Otherwise, why not shoot colour and do your conversion in post?
 
Thnx, any idea how smaller as a matter of interest?
I'd normally do as you suggest but occasionally just a B&W was needed.
 
I often shoot jpegs as B&W and save RAW images at the same time so if I need the colour later it is there in the RAW file.
 
midband,

Thnx, any idea how smaller as a matter of interest?
I'd normally do as you suggest but occasionally just a B&W was needed.
Click to expand...
The file size reduction will vary depending on the image, but just as an example one of my colour 4x6-inch jpegs at 360 dpi came in at ~850 kB. Converted to greyscale, it's ~640 kB. Memory cards are so large now that I doubt this will make an appreciable difference in the number of pix you can store on a card.

If your camera does a decent job at approximating B&W films, however, you might prefer a B&W shot straight out of the camera to a colour shot converted to B&W. It's very much a suck-and-see thing, though.

Joe
 
I use a Fuji XE-1 with an electronic viewfinder. I often set it to shoot in mono and I get a mono image in the viewfinder, which I find very useful. As I shoot RAW + jpg, I also have the RAW image with all the colours in too, but I generally find I keep with the B&W image.

Don't save any image file size though!
 
Just shoot in raw, memory is so cheap these days there is no real advantage to shoot in B&W in the first place, just PP afterwards.
 
Think I'd agree with all the advice here. On my Fuji I used to set it to one of the B&W modes but also keep a RAW. With the Nikons I just shoot RAW and nowt else. I like the combination of Lightroom and Silver Efex.
 
The other thing to bear in mind is noise. With older sensors (eg Nikon D200, Leica M8, Lumix GF1, Olympus E1), higher ISO settings will result in colour pattern noise in shadows. With conversion to Black and white the noise can be reduced to something akin to film grain. I can remember using high ISO black and white film for indoor shots in preference to trying to push colour film. The principle is similar.
 
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