Black and White Portraits

I love black and white photos. They used to be a lot of work to get just the way I wanted them. I fondly recall the days of sitting in a pitch black closet, removing my exposed film from it's canister with a bottle opener, blindly attempting to cut a straight edge to thread the film evenly onto the reel, winding it up just right, then the sigh of relief as I dropped it into the developing tank. Then the chemicals...the developer, the stop bath, the fixer.

I loved working in a dark room, floating carefully contemplated photo paper in trays of chemicals and watching the images appear, timing test strips to get just the right amount of development. And the dodging and burning under the enlarger to fix problem spots. Ahh, fond memories indeed. But I don't miss those days. Photoshop rules.

Working in black and white is so simple these days, that even making a photograph with all of Ansel Adams's zones is easy. The histogram is a very useful tool found in many DSLRs and in Photoshop. It tells us how much of each tone, from black to white and every shade of gray represented in zones 1-9 are present (zone 0 is black and 10 is pure white). By knowing how to read that histogram, we can make adjustments in Photoshop that easily allow us to achieve the look we seek. The histogram helps us achieve more drama in photos in just a few painless minutes.

If you've never studied Ansel Adams's Zone System, I highly recommend it. Here's a link to get you started, but I also suggest Googling for more info, or even grabbing a book or two.

Here are some of my recent black and white portraits. Enjoy!

Miller&Miller Photography