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Our ancestors feared darkness for survival, and that instinct still works in photos. High contrast and deep blacks make images more compelling because viewers linger on the shadows, wondering what's hidden there, even in mundane subjects.
Our ancestors feared darkness for survival, and that instinct still works in photos. High contrast and deep blacks make images more compelling because viewers linger on the shadows, wondering what's hidden there, even in mundane subjects.
Everyone's afraid of the dark.
And as a photographer, you can use that to your advantage. Don't believe me? Ask people if they're willing to walk down some dark alley in a city that they're not familiar with.
Trust me, everyone's afraid of the dark.
And there's a reason for that. We are the descendants of people who didn't wander away from the campfire. They survived and reproduced. The people that wandered away got eaten by saber-toothed tigers and bears and whatever else.
So being scared of the dark is literally in our genes.
But as a photographer, we can use that to our advantage, not to scare people, but to make them more interested in our photos. Photos that have a high contrast with a lot of rich dark black are more interesting. They pique people's attention because we don't know what's hiding in there. It doesn't matter if it's a photo of something tiny that we know nothing can crawl out of and we know it's 2-dimensional. If it's got enough rich dark blacks, people will spend more time looking at it and they will pay more attention to it. Use that to make your photo seem much more interesting.
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