B&W portraits

A long time ago I read a magazine piece about Richard Avedon. One of the

illustrations was a potrtait with areas circled by his hand with instructions

for dodging/burning in. I've never had access to a chemical darkroom but now

with a dslr and photoshop this is suddenly within reach. Can someone suggest a

good book on b&w portraiture or perhaps a general b&w book with a good chapter

on portraits? Could very well be pre-digital.

Also, any book on lighting for portraits? This I suppose had better be more

equipment-centric as all I can afford at the moment is a few Canon speedlites.

Thanks!

Check out your local library to see if any of the old Time/Life photography series haven't

been stolen. Good used book stores are a great bet as well. All of the doging/burning etc.

can be done in post processing as well as all the work with filters that was done with B&W

before digital and there are great multi-tone B&W inksets around for very inexpensive

printers. Kind of like the days when people did B&W in home rigged darkrooms because it

was cheap!

A good book to start off with...

http://a1204.g.akamai.net/7/1204/1401/05032116011/images.barnesandnoble.com/images/9240000/9249912.jpg

I'm afraid we're all on our own on this one. I've seen a couple books at B+H that deal with the topic of B&W portraits, but the examples they give are so bad that you'd never want to imitate them. When you consider that so many of the masters of portraiture worked mainly in black and white, it seems odd that so little quality instruction is available today.</p>

This is not to suggest that there isn't plenty of good instuctional material available on how to take a good portrait, it's just that none of it seems to deal with the specifics of black and white portraiture.</p>

Check out Greg Gorman's website, which has a little bit of instructional material specific to B&W portraits on it. Also look at the promotional material for the Mola Setti, which brings up the idea of using harder light when using B&W than with color. Lastly, if you want to get familiar with the ideas relevant to a traditional B&W darkroom, download the demo version of the Convert to B&W Pro plug-in from the Imaging Factory. This is a Photoshop plug-in that does a pretty good job of digitally emulating the controls that are applied to an image in the real darkroom.

David,

You are best served by getting Photo books that are full of great examples of the look you

want to achieve. No book is going to teach to get shots like Avedon. The Photo you

mentioned of his...it was shot outdoors with the Subject standing in shade with a white

paper backdrop.

Pick up a Bounce reflector (or make one). Put a subject under even shade and bounce light

onto their face.

I go along with carrying a nice reflector-invest in one of the nice collapsibles, it is worth it-and using natural light-ambient light, as it were. If I may; lighting is not the most important aspect of a succesful portrait. Having techniques to "allow" the subject to be themselves, something not often thought about when photographing someone's personality.

Good luck. Best thing to do? Photograph as many people as you can.

I observe that there seem to be two sorts of portrait styles.

One is the tight-crop head-shoulders-only portrait using a medium telephoto lens. Some portrait photographers seem to major on this type of composition in their portraits. That's why, in the Nikon forum, there's a ubiquitous mention of medium telephoto lenses as "portrait" lenses.

The other style is the environmental portrait where you show the person in his/her surroundings, allowing the person's environment to add to the story. Therefore, wider lenses are useful.

I personally don't like telephoto lenses for portraits, because it gives a perspective that is more distant than normal conversational distance. i.e. it is not the perspective that you would have of a person while having a conversation. Thus, there is less immediacy of relationship with the subject. That's why I like wideangles for portraits, my favorite being the 24mmDX or 35mmFF. I mainly use a 12-24 DX Nikon, and rarely my 18-70DX Nikon kit lens.

The B&W medium is a wonderful medium for exploring environmental portraiture, because the removal of color strips away excess trival information, to focus on those structural elements that tell the story about the person's character.

A master of environmental portraiture is, of course, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Books of his are available on amazon.com Recently, a life summary of his work has been published, which contains many portraits.

For examples of B&W portraits,in google images, search for "Walker Evans", "Dorothea Lange", and "Farm Security Administration" to see examples of earlier B&W portraits taken during the great depression.

A good website to study great photography is www.magnumphotos.com under the link "photographers". You can see the B&W portfolios of some of the best photojournalists. These contain some portraits, but for me, there's a blurred line between environmental portraiture and people-photojournalism.

You reference to Richard Avedon, however, suggests that you are more attracted to the formal studio portrait style. Search google images for "Yousuf Karsh" and "Arnold Newman" for B&W environmental portraits with a more studio atmosphere.

I guess my comments may not be what you were asking for, given your query on speedlights, but I love doing available-light portraits. Which is why I'm planning on getting a 18-200 VR (vibration reduction) lens for portraits, even though almost all the posts on the Nikon forum suggest that this is not a good portrait lens. I believe it would suit wide-to-normal lens, environmental portraiture just fine. The poor bokeh doesn't matter so much for wide-angle environmental style, whereas good bokeh would be critical for telephoto head-and-shoulders-fuzzy-background portraiture.

You question seems to be asking for instruction-books on portraits. Mostly, my exploration of portrait photography has not been through teaching-word books, but by studying the photos of the master portrait photographers (as suggested by other posters).

As a footnote, Henri Cartier Bresson didn't like to manipulate his B&W printing too much with dodging or burning. Perhaps he was a purist, seeking to allow the subject to speak, rather than through fancy darkroom manipulation.

Barts,

As a starter, I would invite you to visit Lloyd Erlick's site.

http://www.heylloyd.com/

Don't know if Lloyd has begun working with digital. Anyways, he's a great b&w portrait artist.

As for lighting, you can use your Canon Speedlights mounted on a lighting stand and bouncing or shooting through a small photographic unbrella.