B&W Portrait

Here’s an image of twin girls that I sorta hesitated to show. What I like about it is its very candid feel, and how it seems that the girls are just so caught up in whatever it is they are up to… trying to keep balance I suppose. I also liked the lighting that was present at the moment… a semi-transucent cloud had come to lessen that hard direct sunlight that I always seem to be battling out on these South Florida beaches. Okay, so I get quite excited when a cloud decides to come by during a photo session; does wonders for the contrast I’m trying to manage.

As for why I hesitated to show this image: To my eye, the background competes just a bit too much with the attention on the girls. If I could shoot this over again, I would probably be sure to set my aperture a bit wider so that I could get less depth of field, which would give me a softer, less defined background. What I needed here, ideally, is a soft blur of rocks behind them. Although I could have added this effect in photoshop (and actually did as a personal experiment), I did not want to lessen the image’s candidness, its integrity… I want to have it stand on its own as originally shot. Maybe I should be okay with the busy background? Ü

Tech: Handheld Fuji S2, 60mm 2.8 Nikkor Micro lens set to f3.4, and 1/1000th sec. shutter speed, ISO 100, B/W Fine JPG, ORG tone, Standard Sharp. As usual, I oriented myself so that I had the sun (even though covered by a thin cloud) behind the girls so that I would get backlighting on them, and so that indirect, even lighting would result on the shady side… the one the camera sees. In order to get a much wider aperture for more background blur (next time!), I would have had to use, for example, an 85mm 1.8 lens set at about f2.0 or 2.4.

Everyone,

I’ve taken care of the spam issue, so I have enabled comments once again.

If you’ve never posted a comment before, your comment will be held in moderation until I approve it. If you have commented before, your comment will show up immediately. That is how I have things set up for the moment. Let’s see how it all goes.

Hope to be posting a new image anytime now.

Thanks for sticking with me! Ü

–Eddie.

Hi everybody!

I sure have been missing everyone’s comments lately. Unfortunately, I was getting so much spam in the comments that I had to disable the ability to comment on the images. I felt I had to disable the comments because most of the spam posts invariably contain links to sites you would not want to visit – i.e., not computer healthy – and if you accidentally clicked on a spammer’s link, it could turn out to be a real pain if you weren’t really protected. (I use a Mac, so it’s not a problem for me personally.)

So, for the present time, there will be no comments allowed. I’ll try to find out if there is any way to completely avoid spam while accepting commments. If any of you out there have suggestions, please email me. I’d appreciate it.

–Eddie.

eddie@bwportrait.com

For one of the first times in a long time I indulged in using aperture priority mode on my S2. And I was surprised at how the camera pretty much nailed the exposure for this available window light portrait of a 2 and a half year old boy. He was playing next to the backyard sliding doors of his home when he looked up after I called out his name.

Of course, I was completely taken by this little one (he was the best!), and I have to say it was so much fun following him around with my camera set on the seldom used aperture priority mode. Although I found that the exposure was off maybe 20% of the time — since I often shoot in tricky lighting (backlighting, etc.) — I was overall happy with the decisions the camera made for me. It allowed me to fully place my attention on composition, expression, and the ever elusive decisive moment photographers are always after.

From this little experiment, I have preliminarily decided that when shooting indoors with available light, as long as I’m staying away from overly tricky lighting scenarios, aperture priority just may work for these types of candid, follow-the-child-around shoots. For tricky lighting, like shooting in the direction of large bright areas indoors, I would for sure revert back to manual mode, since in my view it’s all about control when the lighting is tough.

I was happy to add this little boy to my collection. Ü

–Eddie.

Tech info: Handheld Fuji S2, 85mm f1.8 lens, set to f2.4, at 1/1400th sec., ISO 1600, B/W Mode, Normal JPEG, Org Tone, Standard Sharp, AWB, Aperture priority exposure mode, using matrix metering scheme as opposed to spot or center-weighted. Exposure was lightened slightly in order to have the boy appear in tone as he does in real life.