65,536 Shades of Grey

The title perhaps indicates something else, but, it is the title of an illustrated talk I'm putting together to give to photographic societies who are interested in black and white photography. In case it's not clear, 65,536 is the number of equal gradations or shades between pure white and total black in a digital workflow working with 16 bit RAW image files. The number is 2 to the power of 16. There's a huge advantage of working with 16 bit files over 8 bit files, typically JPEG files, which have a total of just 256 grades or shades. The talk touches on some of these advantages, but is really more about my approach to and experience of producing black and white images and is illustrated throughout with examples from my portfolio.