Male Portrait (b/w)

[Digital]

C&C welcomed. Bruce

[Geoff F]

This looks good to me; but Manfred is the portrait expert. It is a subject which I try to avoid.

[Manfred M]

Bruce - the pose and capture are effective, but I feel that you need to be a bit more aggressive in how you handle the image in post. Go a bit harder with the contrast and darken the shot up a bit. A male needs a bit more work that way than a female portrait.

[escape]

The dark version is too extreme in my view. What makes it such a good capture for me are the eyes and the smile. They communicate. I also think it works very well in B/W.

[Manfred M]

The dark version is too extreme in my view. What makes it such a good capture for me are the eyes and the smile. They communicate. I also think it works very well in B/W.

When we create B&W images from our colour cameras, we are essentially trying to emulate images taken with B&W film. If you study the works of the great B&W portrait photographers; Karsh, Avedon, Arbus, Penn, etc. they all printed with rich dark tones. When we do a B&W conversion from a colour image, without additional contrast and appropriate handling of the mid-point, they end up biased towards the highlights too much.

The other issue is that the lighting that Bruce used is one more suited to women and children. There is sexism in photography and we have traditionally posed and photographed them with different approaches. We push the skin tones of men (especially older men) harder and accentuate wrinkles and other "badges of honour". We tend to use more drama in male portraits than we we with female ones.

I spent several hours at a Karsh exhibit yesterday. I spent a lot of time looking how he posed and lit his subjects, the gaze he had them use, how he positioned the hands, how the images were retouched and printed (deep rich blacks and textures throughout). He is the standard many B&W portrait photographers try to emulate (and study).

Unfortunately, I am away from home right now and am working from my laptop, so the conditions are not what I usually have for evaluating others work. I will revisit this image when I get home and may have to tweak it a bit, probably around the eyes.

[DanK]

Bruce,

I too am traveling with only a laptop, so my impressions and edits may be a bit off.

I agree with Manfred about contrast but not about conventional styles. My view is that you should follow conventional styles if you want to and not if you don't. One of the styles that Manfred suggests is to my taste as well--in many cases, accentuating texture and wrinkles in portraits of older men. However, in some cases, that may not be the effect you want.

I agree that Manfred's is too dark. First, look at the histogram for your image:



You can see that you aren't using the entire tonal range. That's the main reason for the lack of contrast.

Now look at the histogram from Manfred's:



This is shifted to the left (dark), but still not using the entire tonal range. In addition, it has a large mass toward the dark end.

Here's an alternative edit. Keep in mind that I'm on a low-quality monitor under bad lighting conditions, so this will be very approximate.



To get this, I did the following:

1. I used the levels tool to raise the black point and lower the white point. This was the primary edit. It had the effect of spreading the histogram over most of the range.

2. I added a tiny bit of midtone contrast with a curves tool.

3. I burned (darkened) the bright spots on his forhead, which became more apparent once the tonal range was expanded.

Here's the histogram. Note that it extends most of the way from black to white but doesn't have the big mass at the dark end that Manfred's has.



Dan

[escape]

[QUOTE=Manfred M;772657
The other issue is that the lighting that Bruce used is one more suited to women and children. There is sexism in photography and we have traditionally posed and photographed them with different approaches. We push the skin tones of men (especially older men) harder and accentuate wrinkles and other "badges of honour". We tend to use more drama in male portraits than we we with female ones.
[/QUOTE]

Maybe not using traditional male lighting is what makes the image so appealing, to me anyway.