The simplicity of a face is lost many times with a color portrait. Now, I know that sounds counter-intuitive but when you remove color and you’re left with black and white and shades of gray the drama comes out in portraits. Black and white can be formal or informal. I have had the pleasure of shooting many interesting people and have always had a love for black and white so I thought about merging the two. In the new digital world there is much attention to color and color management that the art of black and white seems lost somehow – and if we are honest b&w may seem a little too simple for many. With b&w there is still subject and composition to make it either interesting or not. I just love b&w portraits and I hope you do as well.
D. Watts was a pleasure to shoot with because she made it easy and a few other things made this shoot go well. 1) She has a striking appearance with her blond hair style and the dress she picked suited her well. She accessorized very well with bracelets and jewelry. She has spent some time in front of the camera which does help. 2) The time of day was great. It was 6PM and the evening sun was nice and warm. 3) The sunflowers was a very nice setting to match not only her style (personality and music) but the paisley dress also fit nicely. 4) Assistants. Jeff and Brad, helped a lot on this. If you will check out the napkin diagram below you will see how it worked. Brad held my scrim to filter the direct sun off of Denise while Jeff reflected the sun back on her using foam core essentially creating a “Denise Sandwich.” If you notice you can see the left side of her face you can see the foam core reflection. I shot with a 50mm prime opened pretty wide and the rest is a bit of Photoshop retouching with color and contrast. I added some design elements to it with brush swirls, etc.
Also check her tunes out on iTunes…
