Deepen your vision by shooting in black and white

This tip is deceptively simple: shooting in black and white allows you to concentrate on the photographic essentials of shape, texture and tone.

Setting your camera to shoot monochrome jpegs or choosing a black and white film, you dispense with the complexities of colour relationships and enjoy a simplification, an intensification even, of your vision. I say deceptively simple, because although you 'dispense' with one layer, you still have plenty of work to do. It is challenging to translate the colour-based world of ordinary vision into a convincing arrangement in grey. You have to watch light carefully, think about the tones that will be produced and how they will work together, follow shape and line, and observe the play of texture and form. 

If you are used to colour work, you may get a sense of liberation in this. It can be a little holiday from colour relationships - which affect your work whether you know it or not - that makes returning to colour work a pleasure again. You discover a world that is utterly photographic in kind, a world unlike our vision, and become acquainted, or reacquainted, with some basic concerns of image building.

Be warned though. Black and white in itself is very addictive. There is no shortage of eloquent advocates who see it as the highest, most lyrical, or purest form of photography. While this tip is a little more modest and practical in aim, you may just become initiated into something much bigger.