Let’s get this out of the way first: Equipment doesn’t make portraits, people do.

Throughout the history of photography, there have been many articles and books written about the rules of composition that purport to offer a path to creating a perfectly composed image.

As a creative medium, what traditionalists call “monochrome” some digital imagers prefer “grayscale,” but it’s still black and white to me. But there is more to black and white photography than just an absence of color.

I’ve always believed that photography was the universal language and somewhere during its 150 years of existence it has evolved a language of its own. Back in the pre-digital days when certain people became more obsessed with the camera, lenses and photographic ephemera than they were with the images that the cameras created, they were called equipment freaks or sometimes equipment snobs.

Over the years I’ve had some memorable portrait sessions with some wonderfully talented models and I’m often asked about my favorite portrait from these sessions.