foto feedback

Britt says …

My favorite color is black. However, when a black tee shirt blends into a black stereo system in the background, I’m not a fan.

Here I was, trying to shoot a semi-dramatic portrait of a DJ. I decide to shoot with a shutter speed of 1/250 to create a hard light on his face, and to not blow out the wall/ceiling behind him that is being lit by the floor lamp. By doing this, I ended up with little to no detail in my blacks, and every black object blending into one another. In this case, I want people to decipher the different DJ equipment in the room.

What to do, what to do? I want to love my blacks again..

Scott says …

You need to put light on the things you want to see.

If you want to see the DJ equipment, then put some light on it. How to do that? Ambient is always a solution, but a poor choice in this case — you’d lose detail above the lamp and the shadows on his face. A backlight is a traditional way to provide separation between the subject and the background, especially when both are dark in tone. That solution might work for you here, but that room looks a little cramped.

I think your best choice would have been to light the background with a tight beam from a second flash. A snoot or grid would work great. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but some tinfoil provides a no-budget solution for snooting.

Some other comments on this portrait: You’ve got a reflection of your umbrella in his computer monitor (which you could’ve used as a secondary light source). You’ve got some bad merges between your subject and the junk behind him (that CD spindle growing out of his shoulder is especially distracting). And while I like the hand-resting-on-face pose, you didn’t do this guy any favors in the belly department. Perhaps a leaning forward pose would’ve been better, and still got you the low angle you needed for the background.

Remember that we get the luxury of control when we make portraits like this. We can set up our lights however we want. We can put our subject wherever we want. We can move things in the background if we need to. The picture is ours. We’re creating it, and we’re not trying to fool anybody into thinking we’re not. So own it.