Only Shooting Black and White Photos In 2026

What kind of Photographer am I?

2025 was an extremely productive year for me. Not only with photography, but also in my personal life. Without going into specifics, when I turned 28 in 2024, I made a list of goals of things I wanted to pursue or accomplish by the time I turned 30, and I am en route to achieving all of those goals. I won't list them now, but this sort of longer-term goal-setting did make me realize the importance of staying focused on something for extended periods of time.

How does this relate to my photography? I’ve been thinking for a couple of years about whether I am a color photographer or a black-and-white photographer. I mean, I know I am primarily a color photography that occasionaly shoots black and white. But, if I had to put myself in a box of one or the other, long term, which would I pick? I would say 80% of my work since I started shooting in 2017 has been in color. But there is something that I love about that 20% of black and white work in my archive. On Paulie B’s Walkie Talkie series, Dustin Roderick spoke during his episode about the abstraction of reality when shooting black and white. This isn’t a new concept, but it was new to me when I watched, well, edited that episode. It really resonated with me because when I shoot black and white, I do feel generally feel different than when I am shooting color, and I think it has to do with sort of surrealism.

So, to tie it back to my point about goal setting, I have never consistently shot black and white over a long period of time. It was always random. Whenever I felt like switching it up, I would throw a roll of Tri-X or HP5 in, shoot it, then go back to color. The most consistent I have ever shot black and white film was probably November of 2023, where I shot it Illford HP5 for a full month. Because of that and my newfound appreciation for “long-term” goal setting, I am committing to shooting monochrome for all of 2026. Both film and digital.

As of writing this, it is just past mid-March, and I have shoot 99% in black and white since January. Technically, I started shooting black and white in December, but I was just testing this idea at that point.

In the video above, I talk about two lessons or ideas that I have learned since January. I also share some POV footage from a trip to Miami in January. Feel free to watch the video or keep reading for the main points and some extra insights!

Lesson #1: Ignoring Color is HARD.

Something that I feel I didn’t get across well in the video visually, but hopefully I explained myself well, is that when I photograph back home in Miami, color is very important to the story I am trying to tell. Forcing myself to shoot black and white, even when it was raining in Miami Beach, was a big shift. Having to ignore color and only focus on subject, composition, light, and contrast (which there was very little of that day) was tough. I don’t love any of the photos from that day, but there are a few I’ll tolerate. I was also partially in the wrong headspace that morning because it was the one day on that trip that I was able to get out and dedicate hours to photographing. This led me to just putting a bit too much pressure on myself to try and get something good, which, while also trying to film POV footage, was a bad combination.

It’s funny because when I started to take photography seriously, I used to think I could make any of my bad color photos into black and white, and it would “save” the photo. I used to think black and white was a crutch. But now I’ve realized that while great color photos are really hard to make, I think basic color photography is more interesting by default. Colors add visual interest automatically, especially when you are in good light. Color can also become the subject itself. I realized that if anything, even in the future, when I continue to shoot color in Miami, I am able to grow my visual understanding of Miami.

Of course, I hope to carry that new visual understanding, or whatever you want to call it, into the rest of my work.

Lesson #2: Subject is Everything

When I look at my work, if there is one really broad consistent theme that I see in my favorite work is human gestures and interactions. When I am out shooting, I am generally always looking for moments first. I rarely blindly chase things like good light if I know there won’t be some sort of humanity in the scene. Composition is important to me, of course, but it’s always been something that I intuitively do and not something that I strictly follow. Which is probably why my compositions are all over the place sometimes.

While shooting monochrome this year so far, I have realized it has really helped me stay focused on these gestures and interactions. I am looking even harder for moments because I can no longer rely on color to catch my eye or be my visual anchor in a photo. I think stripping the color from these photos also helps in accentuating these gestures, interactions, faces, etc. What I am looking for can exist in monochrome just as well as it can in color. In some ways, creating the abstraction with monochrome helps out. But the difference is that while I am shooting, I am so much less distracted by thinking about color and looking for colors. Instead, I can focus on my subject first, and then I can focus on the light and contrast.

I ended up cutting this part from the video, but when I look over at my bookshelf, most of my favorite bodies of work are black and white. To name a few, I love Baldwin Lee’s monograph, The Americans is a huge influence on me, and Josef Koudelka’s Gypsies has some of the most powerful images I’ve seen in a documentary project like that. I even have this little Henri Cartier Bresson Aperture book that I adore because of how great he was at composing in black and white. All of these books are in black and white, partially because of the time, of course, but besides that, I think they would be weaker with color images. When I flip through these books, one thing that is present to me, even though all three of them are very documentary-focused, is the balance of subject and abstraction.

My Goals

Hopefully, at the end of this year, I can be a better black-and-white photographer. It would be really sad if I didn’t get better at black and white photography after a year dedicated to it, and I would probably quit photography at that point. But a bigger goal for me is, if after this year, if I decide to go back to color, I want to be better prepared to know when I want to shoot color and when I want to shoot black and white and have a good reason why. My final goal is to hopefully create at least 30 images I am happy enough with to put into a zine. I feel like capping off this project with a zine would be a great way to reflect on the year and see my work in the physical realm.

With that said, this was my first blog post. If you read this far, thank you. If you watched my video, thank you. Until next time, peace!