Today is National Reach as High as You Can Day. It encourages us to evaluate our goals and do our best to reach them and I think this is something that we should all stove to achieve.
. Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“when you take a photograph of someone, you take a portrait of their soul”
― Refrain
Black and white is a wonderful media for making portraits because the lack of color helps to simplify the image, allowing the viewer to focus on the real subject of the photograph instead being distracted by their clothing or surroundings. Sometimes the very nature of a portrait subject demands that it be photographed in black and white. Take Arnold Newman’s 1946 portrait of Igor Stravinsky, for example, it could have never been made as effectively in color.
How I made the above shot: Toni is a model who I originally met at the kind of local group model shoots that used to be popular and that I often talk about in my Sunday series of posts, like yesterday’s about outdoor portraiture. Toni and I had a few shoots together including one memorable one for a calendar project that I have lost all but four images from. I live in hope of finding them and maybe even, if all the stars align, working with Toni again.
Sometime the locations and subject’s clothing dictate a pose. The steps of a now restored 1928 armory in Brighton, Colorado were a natural place to pose Toni wearing a retro outfit that complimented her pose. It was shot with my Canon EOS 1D Mark II N and EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens and an exposure of 1/100 sec at f/7.1 and ISO 200. I started processing the image by cropping it using the 5×7 aspect ratio that I felt suited the composition better than how I originally shot it. Next, I used the Full Dynamic (smooth) preset in Silver Efex to produce a monochrome image then added some burning and dodging layers from PhotoKit 2 to extract the textures on the building. Finally, I added a dash of Glamour Glow filter with the slider for Glow Warmth kicked up a little bit to a add a little warm, retro mood.
It’s a Trend?
There are also some trendy aspects associated with creating photographs in black and white. Motion pictures periodically rediscover black and white as a way to reproduce a look that are different from what’s currently being shown. A perfect example is the heart breakingly beautiful Blancanieves, a 2012 silent Spanish black-and-white film that re-imagines the Snow White myth but is set in 1920’s Seville. If you haven’t already seen this movie, you simply must.
Many portrait photographers have told me they have sen a higher than normal demand for black and white portraits than previously was the case. Individual and family portrait decisions like these are also driven by these same trends. It’s something to think about for your next portrait shoot and since you can shoot in color and convert later to black & white, you still have that color original just in case…
My book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects is available from Amazon for $25.03, with used copies selling for around seven bucks as I write this. That’s cheaper than a Starbucks latte, so get’em while you can. Sorry, there’s no Kindle version for those preferring a digital version.