40 Inspirational Black and White Photos

We have recently taught you how to master the art of black and white photography, covered various conversion techniques, and discussed toning. Today we thought that it was time to share a set of inspiring, incredible black and white photos. These images include portraits, macro, landscapes and more!

What Is Black and White Photography?

Black and white photographs can either be taken that way in the first place, or converted from colour afterwards (generally preferable). Most modern colour digital cameras include a black and white mode, though some people would argue that these will never take the same quality of photo as an original monochrome film camera.

The images below include a mix of all these different ways of shooting black and white photography.

Andrew Gibson has already written a fabulous tutorial for Phototuts+ on the subject of converting colour photos to black and white, which is really useful for perfecting your technique.

40 Inspiring Examples

Credit goes to the original photographers, please click on each of the pictures to view more of the photographer’s work and see an enlarged version of the photo.

Thanks For Reading!

I hope you enjoyed looking through these images, and please make sure you comment on the original photographer’s photos as well! Feel free to share links to other inspiring images – your own, or other’s – in the comments.