Beginner's Guide to Photography
Black and White photography is the place to start if you are serious about becoming a better photographer.
Go back to the dark ages before digital. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth and the equivalent of Adobe Lightroom was a small piece of card on the end of a wire. The first thing beginner photographers would learn is to shoot, develop and print a roll of black and white film. These are the benefits to learning to shoot without colour with your digital camera.
1. Start Simple. If you wanted to learn music as a child, you probably started with a recorder. You didn't get handed a double-headed guitar and a book of Zeppelin riffs. Learning photography is very similar. Start with the simplest form of the medium and as you master those elements add things. A Standard lens and black and white images are as simple as it gets.
2. You Learn to Pre-Visualise By disregarding colour, you have to work a lot harder to create great pictures. A beautiful sandy beach in tropical sunshine? An easy shot in colour becomes just expanses of grey. In monochrome you have to find subjects that fit the medium and think about what you shoot before you click the shutter. This previsualisation is perhaps the most valuable skill a photographer can develop.
3. Composition and Form Become Much More Important. Without colour, composition and form are your essential tools for making a good photo. Learning to see shapes and form in abstract helps you compose better pictures later on. Learning is all about creating good habits, and black and white helps you do that. Photographers who started by shooting in this way tend to be very strong on composition, because that is your main tool for creating strong photos. You can't use strong colour to catch the eye.
4. Evaluating Exposure is Much Easier. Blank shadows or blown out highlights are much easier to spot in grey scale. In colour sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a colour cast and bad exposure, and you can tie yourself in knots trying to work out what to correct and in what proportion. Making mono images with detail from the highlights to the shadows is a good way to sharpen your exposure skills, and that makes it easier to deal with colour later on.
Resources: http://www.focusproduction.ca/toronto-wedding-photographer/ http://ezinearticles.com/?Beginners-Guide-to-Photography:Why-Black-and-White-Is-the-Best-Place-to-Start&id=8971967
Thanks for reading!