black & white photoshoot

Back in September I had the pleasure to work with a new model, Manuela, who you’ll see again in the upcoming part 4 of the Fairytales series.

Our first session was a studio test shoot, as I wanted to practice a little more with my 60×60 softbox and 160W flash and, also, I was very determined to shoot black & white portraits. I never shoot black & white, nor I do it in post-processing, so I considered this to be a challenge. Usually, I mainly look at lighting and effects to achieve a certain overall feeling and shooting b&w quite scares m. In b&w the composition plays a very important role along with the light and a correct exposure. You don’t have any distracting colors to hide what might not be 100% right in the other areas.

All I can say was that I loved it! Manuela was also great to work with, posing all the time and coming up with ideas while I was focusing on composition and lighting (it DOES help have a good and confident model). As a result, I had around 200+ images (usually I only hit 100-150) to select from, an awful task to do just because I loved most of them. Good thing that Manuela has a perfect skin, so there wasn’t much post-processing involved (actually, I just did a little clean-up and worked on the lights&shadows and overall contrast).

Plenty of thank-yous go as well to the MUA, Cristina, for doing a great job (at the bottom there’s a colour portrait for her work to stand out as well).

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I’ve also experimented with textures in post-processing for some of the images, which follow below. In this cases, I used a personal texture of an old wall to give the background a little more detail and to enhance the painterly dark effect I chose to portray. It was more of  an unsure “oh, let’s see how it looks with texture” and then a “oh, I love this!” kind of process.

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And below you have a preview of the texture I used for the backdrop. I really hope you like this series! I’d also love to know if you use textures in your post-processing and how do you use them?

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