Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Black and white is the reality of photography. Everything else is just a representation.”—–Paul Strand
I think that Black and white is a wonderful media for making portraits because the lack of color simplifies the image, causing you to focus on the subject’s face of the photograph instead of emphasizing their clothing or surroundings.
It’s All There in Black & White
As I talked about in my book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography, when Mary and I owned our studio I wasn’t really a people photographer. During that time I tended to photograph things, like architecture and products, but occasionally because of scheduling and her availability I would occasionally shoot a business portrait or headshot. People were really Mary’s game and still are to this day.
Back in those not-so-old days the only way that you could (easily) make a black and white portrait was by putting black and white film in your camera. In fact, one of the first questions we would ask whenever a potential client called was, “Do you need black and white or color photographs? Nowadays, when I shoot a portrait and think I want the final image to be black and white, I put the camera in RAW+JPEG mode and set it in monochrome mode. I can see what the (JPEG) image looks like in black and white but will convert the RAW file later in Photoshop.
As a side note, when I took an extended sabbatical from the studio’s operations because of health concerns, things changed for me. Later, I became influenced by the current glamour images that I was seeing on the internet and slowly began making and enjoying portraiture, especially glamour.
How I Made this Photograph: I made this portrait of Amy several years ago during a private model shoot in the hotel room of a magazine editor during the PMA trade show. To make some image for an article I was going to write for Shutterbug, the camera I brought to the show was a Contax G1 with a 45mm f/2.0 Carl Zeiss Planar lens. I never thought I might be doing a model shoot with it.
This image was originally shot on Kodak color negative film so there’s no EXIF data to show that I initially made a series of portraits of Amy at 1/125 sec, when the flash sync for the Contax G1 was 1/100 sec or slower. I initially missed the RED “X” on the shutter speed dial. At this point, my experience could easily have qualified as one of my many “Stupid Photographer’s Tricks” and you can read about and see what these ill-fated images look like in this post. I eventually figured it all out and managed to make (what I thought were) photographs of Amy. Some of the images I made are not possible to show here but might appear in a future Password Protected post.
To create this version of the image I used Silver Efex’s Neutral preset, with a few tweaks to its sliders. First, I always work with the Grain Sliders to minimize noise by making the Grain per Pixel the highest number (500) and then move the Soft/Hard slider to the extreme left to soften any visible grain as much as possible. (These are just my settings, you may increase the grain for a more gritty film look if that’s your style.) More importantly, I selected the Green filter, a filter I might have used if I brought one with me. I set the level for the filter at 50% to split the difference of how the effect would be applied and then added a tiny bit of a contrast. I finished off the portrait with a dash of the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex to add a old-time Hollywood look to the portrait.
Scans of the film were made using Kodak’s Photo CD process and were opened using Lemke Software’s GraphicConverter that produced fairly good quality files from a Photo CD disc. The software is not without its quirks for those people, like me, of using older computers and OS and the aforementioned link details my recent experience with the program.
If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat me to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here. And if you do, thank you very much.
You can learn more about my posing techniques in Posing for Portrait & Glamour Photography with used copies starting around seventeen bucks, as I write this. Kindle versions are $28.45 for those preferring to have the book in digital form.