Today I thought we would look at a couple of black and white portraits. You might not have noticed that yesterday’s and today’s (below) portraits are presented in a landscape orientation. The vertical orientation is often called “portrait” however that is not the format I am using here. In fact all ten of the photos are in landscape. My current preference for landscape may be an artistic choice or it may be a result of working on all the photos digitally and with a landscape monitor landscape photographs look best. If you look through my photo archives you will see that most of them are also landscape oriented. Although, on the photoblog a landscape photograph is much larger than a portrait do to my chosen presentation format. Here are todays portraits that I am going to talk about.

The first portrait was from a wedding I shot for the subject. When working with people, black and white is often very flattering when you keep in mind the difficulties of getting accurate skin tones for people. This photo had shady day light so the color balance was originally not to bad, however when removing color I can increase saturation with out altering the color balance. When converting to black and white I can also adjust what colors go dark and which ones go bright. This allows me to keep the face bright and darken other colors. Again the background is simple and not busy. By using a fast aperture setting though I was able to soften the background and bring focus onto my subject. You can see that part of his hair is in focus and other part is very soft. This is due to being relatively close with an aperture of f2.8. I brought extra attention to his eyes and hair by sharpening the photo some. Sharpening has to be done in moderation, too much and your photo will often look unpleasant.

The second portrait is my cousin Stephen. You have seen this photo before (here and here) in a color version. I came back to it and decided that black and white adds an interesting character to the photo that I like. This is another example of the color filters in the black and white conversion process. I know a color filter when making a black and white photo seems odd but let me explain. If you put a warm filter (yellow, red or orange) in front of you the warm light will come through completly and the cool colors will be filtered out some. So adding the warm filter on the image will let the warm colors in the skin come through and the cooler colors get darker.

I love both of these portraits because the (in my eyes) show the character of the subjects as I know them. Steve is a guy who is always thinking (I can’t vouch for what he is thinking, but he is) and always looking. Stephen is a happy guy most of the time and he is often one of the first people in the room to crack a joke. I think those characteristics come out in this portraits.

Tags: Black and White, Family, Filters, Landscape, Lens, NaBloPoMo '07, Portraits, Wedding