Oisin starts to feel the strain……
Today I decided to forgo using a lot of colour and get back to black and white. There is an old quote that says, “If you want to shoot fashion, shoot in color, but if you want to shoot emotion, shoot in black and white. I don’t know if it is true but it sounds good! To be fair most people are drawn to black and white images, whether it is because they realise what makes a photo is sometimes what they cannot see, what hides in shadows, or whether it is because they are not used to seeing monochrome images in a world of HD colour.
Or something else.
I wanted to create an image that played with light and colour, contrast and saturation so this is what I did.
I shot with a black backdrop and a small light at the bottom lighting just a small amount to differentiate Oisin from the black backdrop. Oisin was lit by a strip light. I placed a green gel over the speedlite flash. The dominant colour in the image is now green. I wanted to shoot this way and then convert the images into black and white. That way I had two options from the same image.
I placed an ND filter over half the strip light to block out the light reaching the backdrop. It was facing Oisin at a 30 degree angle but it was about two feet behind him. On camera right, I placed two white reflectors to bounce some of that light back onto Oisin. I placed a block on the back light so it did not interfere with the subject.
The important thing with side light is that the light should catch the eye, otherwise the image might lack a focal point in the image to draw the eye to.
It helps if you can see the pupil, otherwise you can only see white in the eyes and the person looks like an alien when that happens.
The side light from behind Oisin lights the side of the face but not the front. The reflective light takes care of the rest of the image.
Here is a similar image but with the colour added and contrast and clarity increased.
By getting Oisin to just wear a white vest, we kept the colours plain and simple.
When the image is converted into black and white, you can see the side light works really well. You can have plenty of fun in post processing tweaking your images. I went with a nice soft look. If this was a pic of a man
In this image, the contrast and clarity were increased to give the image a more hardened look
I have a similar image below as a colour image. Here the image is desaturated to create a lovely soft mood.
In this image, the colour is desaturated while the contrast is low.
When Oisin turns around, there is still plenty of reflective light on his face to create a soft under exposed look, though there is no catchlight in the eye.. - He couldn’t wait to get out of here and play!
The strip light has a green gel over it and is two feet behind the subject to camera left. The power setting is 1/32 and the exposure is F5.0 at 160th at 400iso