The Art of Black & White Photography, Assignments

The Art of Black & White Photography, Assignments is an intensive and hands-on four week course that we’ve been running since 2013: designed to be taken online, alongside (or after) The Art of Black and White Photography on Chromasia or Udemy^†. Devised and run by David J. Nightingale – an internationally acclaimed, award winning photographer and instructor – this is the course that will take your black and white photography to the next level.

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If you haven’t taken The Art of Black and White Photography yet – David’s 6.5 hour video course on black and white postproduction – sign up for the assignments class and we’ll give you free access to this highly popular online course (normal price $149). All you need to do is sign up for the assignments, drop us a line, and we’ll send you a free sign up code for the videos.

Availability

The next occurrence of The Art of Black and White Photography, Assignments will take place towards the end 2019. Sign up for our newsletter if you’d like to be kept informed.

Further Details

During this four week class you will:

Work through four key assignments, one each week.
Receive detailed and informative written critiques on your assignment images.
Be able to view the critiques on your fellow students’ images.
Participate in four live webinars, one for each assignment.

The Assignments

Each of the four assignments has been designed to test your understanding, develop your skills, and improve your black and white photography through the provision of detailed and informative critiques of your work.

Week 1 – Conversion Techniques
This assignment will enable you to explore and master a range of black and white conversion techniques.

Week 2 – Tonal Range and Contrast
Assignment two expands your proficiency to alter the tonal range and contrast of your images, both globally and selectively.

Week 3 – Portraiture
The third week’s assignment concentrates on developing your ability to create stunning black and white portraits.

Week 4 – Toning Techniques
The final assignment is designed to refine and further develop your capacity to add unique and complex tones to your images.

For most of the assignments you will be asked to submit two layered PSD files, along with a summary of your rationale for the techniques you used and how they were applied.

The Critiques

For each of your assignment images David will provide a detailed, informative and helpful critique: identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your approach, along with a range of suggestions on what to do to improve your images. Additionally, and when appropriate, David will also edit your Photoshop files to illustrate the points he makes.

The Webinars

While the critiques provide a detailed and invaluable analysis of your own images, the webinars will enable you to develop a much broader understanding of each of the topics covered during this four week course. During each of the live webinars David will work through a range of the images submitted for each assignment: highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and any common points of interest or problems that arose during the week. You’ll be able to discuss your own images with David, and contribute to the discussions when he critiques your fellow student’s images.

Each webinar is recorded, so if you can’t make it to the live event you can download it and watch it later.

"David Nightingale’s course changed my approach to processing in some fundamental ways. Watching how David processed particular shots, and hearing him explain why he was opting for one approach rather than another, improved my ability to analyze my own images. His critiques were polite, insightful, blunt and always helpful. They showed me how to be a better and more rigorous self-critic. David's course was the best investment I’ve ever made in photography."

"David's course has greatly exceeded my expectations: having a well structured program that challenges different aspects of B&W photography together with detailed commentary at each stage is valuable enough. But, further having the opportunity to hear and to see detailed critiques on the many other photos submitted has been a great benefit to us all and has deepened my understanding a great deal. I did not expect to get this much benefit from an online course. Highly recommended."

So How Does It Work?

As soon as you sign up you’ll be able to download the course handbook^†. This contains a detailed brief for all four of the weekly assignments, instructions on how to prepare and send your images and notes to us, and the timetable for your course. Typically, assignment images are submitted on Monday, you will receive your critique by Friday, and the live webinar will take place on Sunday evening (the exact times will be included in your handbook). Each webinar will be recorded, so if you can’t attend at the specified time you can download it and watch it later.

We’ll also send you an invitation to the Dropbox folder for your course. If you don’t have Dropbox, don’t worry, it’s free, will give you 2GB of free online storage, and is easy to set up on either a Mac or PC.

And finally, we’ll send you a weekly invitation to the webinars. We use Zoom for our webinars, so all you’ll need to do is download the free plugin when you receive your first invitation and you’ll be good to go.

^† PayPal should redirect you to the downloads page for your course when you sign up. If it doesn’t just get it touch and we’ll send you a copy.

Who Should Take This Course?

This course has been designed to be taken by anyone who:

Wants to dramatically improve their black and white photography, and …
Has taken, or plans on taking ‘The Art of Black and White Photography’ on chromasia or Udemy (see below for further details).

That said, if you haven’t taken ‘The Art of Black and White Photography’, but would still like to take this course, get in touch to check if it would be suitable or useful for you.

Student Gallery

Included below is a small set of images produced by students of The Art of Black & White Photography, Assignments during the last few years.

The Art of Black And White Photography

If you haven’t checked out The Art of Black and White Photography yet, watch the promo video below: it’s only short, but it will give you a good overview of what’s covered in this course. Alternatively, take a look at the course page for a more detailed summary.

"David Nightingale is the best Photoshop instructor for any photographer wanting to improve their post production techniques. David's style is clear, precise, easy to understand, and always brings immediate results. His wealth of expertise in Photoshop shines through, giving the training videos a unique and personal feel to them, it's almost as if David is sitting next to you, guiding you through the workflow. The course covers everything you'll ever need to transform your images into stunning B&W, and it also encourages you to think about the process before you click the shutter. If you want to improve your images with guaranteed results, this is the course for you. To conclude, in my opinion, this will soon be the defining course in The Art of Black and White Photography, taken by the leading photographers of the future."

Questions?

If you have any questions about this course, or any of the information on our other training pages, please get in touch with either David djn1@chromasia.com or Libby libby@chromasia.com.

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