This article is a companion piece to "Breaking the Rules of Black and White Photography" featuring Peter Coulson on The Camera Life podcast. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (Episode 154).
All images supplied by Peter Coulson www.peter-coulson.com.au
Peter Coulson got kicked out of photography school. Not for being disruptive, exactly. More for asking too many questions. He kept putting his hand up and saying why, and eventually the instructor told him to just go try it himself. So he did. That was decades ago, and he hasn't stopped asking why since.
These days Coulson is one of Australia's most recognisable portrait and fashion photographers, with a client list that spans commercial giants and a YouTube channel with a genuinely devoted following. He's also, depending on who you ask, either refreshingly honest or a complete pain in the arse. Probably both.
In a recent episode of the Camera Life Podcast, he sat down with Greg Cromie, Justin Castles and Jim Aldersey and said a lot of things that photography educators would rather he didn't. What came out of it was less a technical breakdown and more a pretty compelling argument for why most photographers are getting in their own way, and why the industry is quietly helping them do it.
Black and White Isn't a Vibe, It's a Commitment
Coulson shoots almost exclusively in black and white, but he's got no patience for what most people mean when they say the same thing. Chucking a Lightroom preset on a colour file and calling it black and white is not, in his view, the same thing at all.
The reason he cares so much comes down to longevity. Colour photography dates itself. You can look at an image and clock the decade it was made in just from the grade. He's not subtle about where he thinks current trends are headed: "Look how much teal and orange is in shit now."
That grade that's all over commercial photography and cinema right now? In fifteen years it'll look as cooked as the oversaturated HDR look of the early 2010s. Black and white, done properly, doesn't have that problem. It just exists.
Here's where it gets interesting, and where Coulson will lose some people. He has zero interest in shooting film, and he'll never buy a dedicated monochrome digital camera. Not because he doesn't love the film look. He does. But shooting on a monochrome sensor or actual film locks you into a single tonal palette. Everyone using the same medium ends up with the same look. The real creative power of black and white comes from converting colour digital files, because that's where you can actually shape the tonality, push and pull individual colour channels, and build something that's genuinely yours.
He's spent a couple of hundred hours constructing his own film grain overlay system, scanning actual film stocks, shooting white walls at 18% grey, building overlays that replicate the grain structure of specific films at specific apertures. His film photographer mates can't tell his digital work from his medium format film work when they're sitting side by side. The point isn't to fake film. The point is to have complete control over every element of the image.
The Eyes Are the Whole Point
Before any of the post-production stuff matters, you have to actually get something worth keeping in camera. And here, Coulson is just as uncompromising.
He doesn't like look-away shots.
"Look away to me is a failure. I'm not seeing her soul come out her eyes."
This is a direct shot at one of the most common tropes in contemporary portraiture, the subject gazing off into the middle distance, the carefully averted eyes. For Coulson, those images are technically fine and emotionally empty. They're poses, not people.
His fix is to get subjects moving. He'll turn his camera off entirely and shoot video, because the moment a model knows a still frame isn't being captured, they stop performing and start moving like a normal human being. He watches for the drift, the small unconscious patterns that emerge, and then starts shooting into that. Once they're moving naturally, he works on the inside:
"Go to your favourite place in the world. Don't tell me. I don't want to know. You just go there right now and be there with who you want to be there with."
He genuinely doesn't want to know where they go. He just wants them to actually go there. The specificity of it, a real place, a real person, produces a real expression. It's the difference between someone thinking about being happy and someone actually, briefly, being somewhere else entirely.
Rules Are Just Someone Else's Style
Coulson runs workshops, and on the first day he does something that tends to throw people. He spends an hour going through every rule of photography and then showing them every image of his that breaks it.
The horizon doesn't have to be level. He's photographing the person, not the horizon. "As soon as you make it level, the picture just loses its soul completely. It looks boring."
He tells a story about a shot where a foot crept into the edge of the frame. He could have cloned it out in seconds. He didn't. "That foot was the thing that made the picture unique. And it speaks of my messed up sense of humour." The imperfection became the personality.
He's also recently made a deliberate decision to dial his retouching back by 50%. Not because he's gotten lazy, he's meticulous about his process, but because he noticed the images with less work on them had more life. Your instinct about what to leave in and what to take out is your style. The moment you start correcting everything to match someone else's idea of a good photograph, you stop making your photographs.
The Industry Is Quietly Working Against You
Coulson thinks camera manufacturers have a vested interest in keeping photographers dependent on automation, and that the whole trajectory of the industry is toward removing creative decision-making from the process entirely. "The camera manufacturers don't want you having a soul."
He shoots in full manual, always, and won't take photographers into his workshops who haven't mastered it. His concern isn't really about the technology itself. It's about what happens to your instincts when you outsource decisions. Every time the camera makes a call for you, you lose a small piece of the feedback loop that develops your eye. Over time, you stop knowing why an image works.
The same logic applies to gear. He's currently selling off lenses he barely touches. "Having them is confusing my photography. If you've only got one lens, you don't think about it. You have two lenses now you're thinking. You have five lenses. You're not taking a picture."
AI Can't Copy a Soul
Coulson's workshop Facebook group bans AI-generated imagery outright, and they've had to remove a fair few people for sneaking it in. But his issue with it isn't sentimental. It's practical. "AI doesn't scare me for me. It scares me for other people. Once you get your own soul and show the world your soul, AI can't copy a soul."
The photographers most at risk from AI are the ones who've spent their careers making technically correct, stylistically generic images. The ones who aren't at risk are the ones making images that could only have come from them. And the path to that isn't better gear, more presets, or whatever AI grading tool drops next. It's the slower, less comfortable work of figuring out what you actually see, and then having the confidence to show it, stray foot and all.
What to Actually Take Away
Get them moving, then get the eyes. Wait for the moment your subject forgets they're being photographed. Give them somewhere real to go in their head, and wait for the eyes to show you something.
Your mistakes might be your style. Before you fix something in post, ask whether it actually bothers you, or whether you're correcting it because you think you're supposed to. Dial the retouching back and see what's still there.
Make every decision yourself. Shoot manual. Limit your lenses. Build your own black and white conversion. The more decisions you make consciously, the more your images will start to look like you made them, because you did.
Want more conversations like this?
Subscribe to The Camera Life Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify for weekly discussions on photography, gear, and the creative process. Or catch us live on YouTube every Thursday at 9am Australian Eastern Time.
Follow Peter Coulson
To see more of Peter's work and learn how he creates his images, visit his website at peter-coulson.com.au or subscribe to his YouTube channel.
