Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Pulvis et umbra sumus. (We are but dust and shadow.)” ― The Odes of Horace
In my post A Few Recent Trends in Portrait Photography, I talked about three trends I noticed on social media. Up until recently they had all disappeared by one of them has come slamming back, especially with photographs of women wearing lingerie. To quote myself:
“Underexposed images is more of a technical detail and maybe I’m too sensitive about this subject but some photographers seem to think that the best way to show a dark film noir mood is by underexposing the portrait. Nope. When you underexpose you may make it darker but you also make it flatter and dull. To successfully work with shadows also means the portrait should have some highlights too.”
So I decided to try and experiment. And here are two images, one that follows that trend and one that has been manipulated—I hesitate to say, “enhanced”—in Photoshop to create the kind of image that I would like better. You can like whichever one you like. This is not a contest and you don’t have to vote for one over the other. Based on my experience trying this before the audience for this blog seems to be split down the middle.
Original: (above right) For this available light portrait, Megan Textor posed in front of the tall, shin windows in the living room of my former home. Camera used was a Canon EOS D60—not 60D—with an EF 22-55 f4.0-5.6 EF USM Lens. (I’ve seen this useful lens on sale on Amazon for less than forty bucks) Exposure was 1/80 sec at f/6.3 and ISO 400. Trivia: Like several models I’ve photographed that became chefs, Megan went on to work as a successful pâtissier.
After: (at left) Before I did some light retouching to the portrait—and I did exactly the same to both images—I applied the Dodge Two-thirds Left filter from the now free PhotoKit. Twice. The first time I applied the later at 100 percent, the second time at 40 percent, Then I ran Dfine to stomp any noise, followed by retouching with Imagenomic’s Portraiture, which I applied at 50%. This was followed by applying the Glamour Glow filter, again at 50 percent.
If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to buy Joe a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here. And if you do, thank so very much.
Several photographs of Megan appear in my book Available Light Glamour Photography that’s available from Amazon with new copies of the book for just $29.95 with used copies starting around twenty-one bucks as I write this. The Kindle version is $28.45 for those preferring a digital format.