B&W (Outdoor light)

All natural light, taken in the late evening. I think this photograph

shows his personality well. Thanks for visiting.

Nicely done. The whites of the shirt seems over, but the skin tones are caught just right. Love the depth in the eyes. Good use of DOF to minimalize the background distraction.

Yes, this is one of the best of Larry...good for newspaper or add's.....

javed, let me know if you want any details about my post. I tried to lower the viewer's eye point.

That is incredible what you did, is it some type of filter like a fill flash, looks far better than before. I know you did some dodge and burning on the face as well, let me know here or e-mail, about the details, what you did to achieve this. Thanks for taking the time, I appreciate it.

Thanks Javed. I thought you might be mad, so I'm glad you like it.

 

My goal was to get the viewer's eyes to drop from his the top of his head, to his eyes and then to stay there. I accomplished this by using only two tools: burning and dodging.

 

I started off by burning the green area to make the light appear as if it was coming from the left. Direction is determined by shadows, so if I "cast" a shadow on his left side there will be a subconscious perception that light is coming from the other side.

 

Next, I slowly burned the purple area so that it was darker, but not too dark. I didn't want to make him look like he was in a cave, but just so the viewer wouldn't be attracted to his head. We may not care that this man is bald, but he grew up with hair and slowly lost it, so it might not be something he wants to be reminded of when looking at his photograph. Also, as I said, I wanted to lower the eyepoint.

 

Next, I burned the blue area, but not a lot, because I wanted to simulate light from that direction, so I burned it just to bring it down in tone a little darker than the face.

 

Next, I dodged the area in the yellow circle. Then, I dodged the red area a little more. After that, I went in with the burning tool and darkened just the shadows because they went gray during the dodge. In the darkroom, this effect is easier and can be done with just one motion, but photoshop won't let you pick a dodge or burn tool that affects shadows, midtones and highlights equally at the same time. In burning I had to burn multiple times: once for the highlight, then again over the same area for the midtone, for example.

 

That's pretty much all I did. I moved the middle area of the levels slider a pinch to the left to lighten the image overall to make up for photonet's black gain on image load. That's why his tux has more detail.

 

I also darkened the edges.

 

The difference, I find, and you may disagree, is that your original post doesn't change the longer I look at it, where as my revision begins to look unnatural the longer I look at it. That might be an artist/artwork problem, where you can easily see the faults in your own work, but I don't know.

 

The end result is that when I look at the revision, I go straght to the eyes, his left eye, specifically, which is slightly dominate, and because of my dodging, slightly lighter.

 

I hope the wild colors aren't a problem for Larry. If they're offensive I'll take down the post, and reload the text only.