One of my goals going forward with the blog is to make and show more portraits. It's something I love to do. I used to worry that my best days as a portrait photographer were behind me but every once and a while a friend whom I photographed twenty years ago will drop by and we'll make fresh portraits. Then I can look and see that the portraits are somehow different than the ones we took years ago but not worse or less emotive to us.
Michelle and I spent an hour talking before we started making photographs. Once we got started we just went with the flow of the afternoon and had fun catching up and being with each other. This image was the very last one of our hour long session. She seems fresher than when we started.
I won't belabor the technical details other than to say that I used a Sony A7rii and took advantage of the eye detection AF. I used the 70-200mm f4.0 FE lens and, contrary to recent practice, lit the session with one large and more small softbox and electronic flash. The only other modifier was a soft, white reflector used to one side. Fun.
Added a bit later: Here is original color image this black and white rendering is based upon:
6 comments:
Lovely portrait Kirk and Michelle. Good work.
I do like your B&W portraits, bit for this one the color wins hands down.
Question: a portrait session is made more stressful by the extremely bright lighting, which is not at all like sitting in a living room. Now with low noise high ISO, can you use the same lighting setups but at significantly lower brightness?
Hi Tom, If you like continuous light you have the option of working with as low a level as you want; as long as there is enough light by which to focus. When working with flash I keep the overall illumination of the modeling lights at the general light level of what is coming through the big studio windows. No one is stressed by light in our shoots. I'm not a huge fan of flash but..... there it is.
Did you try the magic lantern recipe to see how worked? And lovely portrait in black and white. Seems you have the highlight gradation solved.
Jay
Yep, against type, I also think that the colour one is best in this instance. Lovely work
Mark
I never get sick of seeing your portraits, the rapport you develop with the subject shines through.
For what it's worth I like the b&w version
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