Black and White Portraiture

This is old school, a sample of my pre-digital era B&W portraits.



I worked with Barb, and thought she would have potential for a shoot. Ilford FP-4 120, Mamiya 645, 150mm lens.



This was actually a colour negative (Kodak VPSIII), but instead of using a panchromatic paper like Panalure, I used Ilford Muligrade with an 80B filter to neutralize the orange mask. This gave Barb pan skin and pale eyes that I like in this study.



Debby was shot with the Mamiya 645, and 150mm lens combination onto Ilford FP-4 which is my favourite B&W emulsion. The print was printed 11x14" onto Kodak Ektalure paper, and selenium toned for the warm look.



Jennifer was a 35mm Kodak VPSIII negative, Pentax LX, 85mm f:2 lens converted to monochrome with Photoshop CS2.

Finally Nancy is the most Photoshopped portrait in this set. Lovely girl nice look. But she was wearing a tank top, that didn't really work in the photograph.



This caused a hot bare shoulder. So I added the textured black shoulder and sleeve to the photo. I also did a little smoothing out of her skintones.

Darrell