Painting with light works very well in monochrome because the lack of colour in the image accentuates the tonal ranges between the light and dark areas. As with any monochrome image, the best ones work when you have pre-planned it, rather than those that you have desaturated just because they didn’t look good as a colour photograph.
You can buy cameras that only take monochrome photographs (examples include the Pentax K3-III Monochrome) or you may find a ‘black & white’ setting on your existing camera. Personally, I just take the images as normal but concentrate on the effect of the light and shadows, rather than the colour, and then desaturate the image in post-processing (usually using the ‘black & white’ module in Lightroom).
The subjects of this shot are actually life-sized wooden ornaments taken on a hastily rearranged dining room table, thus showing how easily you can create a studio-type setting using the Painting with light technique.
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