I started this Sunday series on outdoor portrait and glamour photography last year because I enjoy this genre. I’ve written four books on this subject, including one on Available Light Glamour Photography that nicely fits this series of posts. I also wrote a book about Creative Monochrome Effects, that if I written today would include more portraits.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Although humans see reality in colour, for me, black-and-white [photography] has always been connected to the image’s deeper truth, to its most hidden meaning.” – Peter Lindbergh
A few weeks week I featured a black and white outdoor portrait of Brenda that was shot in direct monochrome along with another version of it that was colorized. Today I want to flip the concept and take an image that was originally shot in color, convert it to monochrome, making it look as good as I can and then show the original color file, so you can compare and maybe tell me which you like best.
Black and white outdoor portraits?
There’s more to black and white photography than just a lack of color. As a creative medium, some purists may call it “monochrome” and digital imagers might prefer “grayscale” but to paraphrase Billy Joel, “it’s still black and white to me.” Black and white is a wonderful media for making portraits because the lack of color immediately simplifies the image, causing you to focus on the true subject of the portrait—their face—instead of their clothing or surroundings. This is a subject that Barry Staver and I talk about in an upcoming podcast. If you haven’t seen any of our recent photographic podcasts, you can find them on my YouTube channel.
How I Made this portrait: Today’s featured model is Kellie, who was the model that was the focus of so much controversy that I wrote about in my post How to Please Book and Magazine Publishers? This image was made when I photographed her at a group model shoot in Northern Colorado. Mary and I photographed Kellie many times, as in our recent post about outdoor bridal photography.
The camera used for this portrait was a Canon EOS 5D Mark I with an EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 USM lens at 105mm. The exposure was 1/250 sec at f/6.3 and ISO 200 with a minus one-third stop exposure compensation. A Canon 550EX speedlite was used as fill with a Sto-fen Omni Bounce diffuser attached to soften the light. The image was slightly underexposed and instead of using my technique for correcting underexposed portraits, I used (the now free) PhotoKit’s burning and dodging tools in layers that provides control by using Opacity level changes as well as by Erasing part of a layer.
Conversion to Black and White
The first thing I did was to crop the image into what you see above right. Why? There’s nothing wrong with in-camera cropping of the full-length image at left except it’s not really full length. Instead of the 3:2 aspect ratio it was shot at, I decided to crop the photograph into a 5×7 format. This is not as ideal as the 4:3 ratio social media prefers but it fit the image better and that’s always my main decision when cropping.
My next step was to apply Silver Efex’s High Structure (smooth) preset, with the Yellow filter selected to give her face more emphasis. Then I bumped the plug-in’s Contrast slider down slightly to lower contrast and moved the Grain Per Pixel slider all the way left to the softest setting to lower graininess or noise. To wrap up the process I applied the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex to add some glamour to the portrait.
To tell the truth I like both versions of the portrait but for different reasons. The color versions seem, to me, to be the friendly version that highlights Kellie’s All-American Girl look. I think the black and white version says drama and glamour but you may your own reasons for liking one more than the other.
I really enjoy writing these Sunday posts on outdoor portraits and the occasional Thursday #anythingcanhappenday posts about studio and glamour photography. If you would like to see more of these kinds of posts in color or black and white, please click CONTACT and let me know. If you want to see more information about other topics whether its about infrared photography or Macro, automobile photography or you-name-it, let me know about that as well.
Postscript: If you would like to see uncensored portraits of Kellie or any of the other models who have appeared on this blog, please consider subscribing to my Patreon that gives you access to all of the past and upcoming uncensored posts about model photography. You can find the details in this post. You should know that 100% of the money from Patreon goes to keeping this blog on-line. It goes to pay for hosting, domain name renewal and the software that runs this site,
Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is a book featuring information about how I shoot glamour portraits in available light situations or by using minimal lighting equipment such as reflectors or speedlights. Used copies are available from Amazon.com for around ten bucks, as I write this. Kindle copies are $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.