Previsualizing Impact: Black & White Photography
Previsualizing Impact: Black & White Photography is a three-part speaker series focused on one of the most powerful—and often overlooked—skills in photography: learning to see the final image before you press the shutter.
While many photographers approach black and white as a post-processing decision, the most compelling images begin long before that moment. They are recognized, composed, and intentionally captured with the final result in mind.
In this series, Matt Payne’s Compositional Elements That Work With Black & White explores how light, contrast, and structure can be used deliberately to build stronger images from the ground up. Murray Livingston’s Recognizing B&W Images in the Field shifts the focus to awareness—training your eye to identify scenes that naturally translate into powerful monochrome photographs. Huibo Hou’s Elevate Your Photography with Dynamic Simplicity brings it all together, showing how refinement and reduction can transform complex scenes into images with clarity, emotion, and lasting impact.
Together, these sessions move beyond editing techniques and into the deeper discipline of visualization—helping you anticipate how light, form, and tonal relationships will come together in the final image.
This series builds on our previous explorations of vision and intention in black and white, but pushes further—into the moment of creation itself. It’s about slowing down, seeing more clearly, and making more deliberate choices in the field.
Hosted by Murray Livingston, this series is designed for photographers who want to create black and white images with greater purpose, clarity, and impact—from the very beginning.
- November 14 — Recognizing B&W Images in the Field (Murray Livingston) — 9:00 AM PT
- November 21 — Elevate Your Photography with Dynamic Simplicity (Huibo Hou) — 9:00 AM PT
- November 28 — Compositional Elements That Work With Black & White (Matt Payne) — 9:00 AM PT
Want to join us LIVE? Be sure to register for the Zoom session after purchase.
Want to watch on-demand? Each session will hit your NPC account the morning after it is presented LIVE.
Nature Photography Classes offer a unique opportunity to hear from and interact with people that rarely speak with audiences and are considered some of the best photography educators in the world.
Murray Livingston teaches "Recognizing B&W Images in the Field"
Murray Livingston
Recognizing B&W Images in the Field
LIVE session on November 14 at 9:00 AM PT or on-demand beginning November 15th.
Black and white photography is the translation of the world around us, an abstraction, a distillation. In this presentation, Murray shifts our focus towards training your eye to identify scenes that naturally translate into powerful monochrome photographs. Rather than relying on your camera's built-in profiles to approximate the landscape in black and white, Murray teaches you to see in monochrome. When we remove colour, what are we left with? The formal elements of composition are the basis of any good black and white photograph. We have to attune ourselves to recognise these in the natural landscape: texture, form, contrast (luminance and colour), lines, geometry... The list goes on. Throughout the presentation, Murray will show examples from his extensive black and white portfolio in order to demonstrate why some black and white photographs work and others don't, why composition is king, and what you can do when you're in the field to recognise scenes with monochrome potential.
Bios:
Murray is a full-time professional landscape and nature photographer, educator, and workshop leader with more than 10 years of image making experience. Murray photographs all aspects of the landscape through long-term photographic projects in Scotland, where he is based most of the year in a self-built campervan, and his home country of South Africa. He is a deep thinker with interests in adventure & conservation, both of which he strives to communicate and teach through a deeply contemplative and introspective approach to photography.
Huibo Hou teaches "Elevate Your Photography with Dynamic Simplicity"
Elevate Your Photography with Dynamic Simplicity
LIVE session on November 21 at 9:00 AM PT or on-demand beginning November 22nd.
I have long believed that black-and-white photography is at its strongest when it embraces simplicity. But simplicity alone is not enough - it needs visual tension. Freeman Patterson writes, “Two things are present in all good pictures - order and tension.” He goes on to explain that “Simplicity brings order to compositions,” but “we need to balance order with tension.” “The ideal to strive for is a combination of the two - dynamic simplicity.” This concept of Dynamic Simplicity has profoundly influenced the way I see and photograph landscapes.
Yet nature is often visually complex and chaotic. In this presentation, I will share how I identify the essence of a scene in the field, balance simplicity with tension in the composition, visualize the finished image, and refine it through thoughtful post-processing to create images that are both elegantly simple and dynamically engaging.
Bio:
Huibo Hou, is a landscape photographer based in San Diego, California. She fell in love with photography near three decades ago as a hobbyist while working in the wireless semiconductor industry. Then life took her in different directions, and she had to set aside her photography pursuit for quite some time. In early 2015, she rekindled her love for photography and gradually became more serious about the craft. Photography has since become an integral part of her life, quietly guiding her on an enduring path of artistic exploration and self-discovery. Over the years, her work has been recognized internationally through multiple awards, publications and speaking engagements. Landscape photography, especially in black and white, is the art medium that she is most passionate about. It serves as her creative outlet to express how she observes, interprets, and connects with nature.
Matt Payne teaches "Compositional Elements That Work With Black & White"
Matt Payne
Compositional Elements That Work With Black & White
LIVE session on November 28 at 9:00 AM PT or on-demand beginning November 29th.
Black and white is usually treated as something you decide in post. This talk makes the case for deciding it in the field, before the shutter fires. I'll break down the compositional elements that actually work once color is removed: light and shadow relationships, contrast and tonal separation, line, shape, and texture. These aren't abstract principles; they're the tools that determine whether an image reads as strong monochrome or just a desaturated color photo. I'll use real examples from my own work to show how I identify these elements in the field and compose around them deliberately, rather than hoping they show up in the edit. The goal is to leave you with a practical framework: a way of seeing that lets you recognize, in the moment, whether a scene has what it takes to hold up in black and white, and how to compose it so it does.
Bio:
Matt Payne is a Colorado-based nature and landscape photographer, mountaineer, and conservation advocate. Rooted in a lifelong connection to the mountains, Matt’s work reflects a deep respect for wilderness and a commitment to ethical, truthful photography. He is the co-founder of Nature First Photography and co-creator of the Natural Landscape Photography Awards. Through his podcast, F-Stop Collaborate and Listen, he engages with photographers worldwide on topics of creativity, ethics, and environmental responsibility.
