Black & White Photography: Seeing Beyond Color with Amy Jasek
What happens when you stop photographing color and start photographing light, shadow, texture, shape, and emotion? This hands-on workshop with photographer Amy Jasek explores the art and craft of black-and-white photography—from developing a stronger visual eye to making more intentional decisions before you ever press the shutter. Whether you shoot digital, film, or both, you’ll learn how to recognize scenes that translate beautifully into black and white and how to use contrast, tonal range, light, and composition to create images with greater impact. The workshop introduces the Zone System and other practical tools for understanding exposure and tonal relationships, while also exploring how to develop a more personal and intuitive approach to black-and-white photography. This isn't simply about converting a color image to grayscale. It’s about learning to see differently.
What You'll Learn
- Seeing in Black & White — Train your eye to recognize light, shadow, texture, contrast, and composition without relying on color.
- The Zone System — Build a practical understanding of tonal values and how they influence your final image.
- Intentional Exposure — Learn how to make exposure decisions with your finished black-and-white photograph in mind.
- Light & Contrast — Explore how the quality and direction of light can dramatically change a monochrome image.
- Composition Without Color — Discover ways to use shape, lines, texture, patterns, and visual relationships to create stronger compositions.
- Developing Your Creative Vision — Move beyond technical settings and begin identifying the qualities that make a black-and-white image feel like your photograph.
- Digital & Film Workflows — Explore concepts and tools that apply across both digital and film photography.
- Creating a More Organic Workflow — Learn practical ways to make black-and-white photography a more intentional part of your creative process.
About Amy Jasek
Native Texan and the daughter of a photographer, Amy Jasek has spent more than 25 years developing her craft and exploring the expressive possibilities of photography.
Amy graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Dance in 1999 and began pursuing photography seriously in 2003. In 2009, she began exhibiting her darkroom prints, and her work has since been shown across multiple states and in Europe.
Her photography is largely black and white, spanning both film and digital, with a particular focus on narrative, candid, and documentary imagery. People are her favorite subjects, but her curiosity extends to just about anything that catches her eye.
For more than a decade, Amy has served as the website manager and Instagram curator for the Film Shooters Collective. She is also a committee member of the Texas Photography Festival, where she was a featured photographer in 2023 and a photowalk leader in 2026.
Amy is passionate about photography as both a creative practice and a community. Drawing on a lifetime of learning from her father and more than two decades of personal experience, she brings an approachable, thoughtful perspective to helping photographers develop their own vision.