Monochrome Digital Photography, Light, Dodging, and Duotone
Whilst Dad Slaves To Earn A Crust
Mother And Daughter Watch TV Again!
Here’s a monochrome picture of Amazon and Irem. They’re watching ‘Finding Nemo’ on T.V. It’s the sort of scene that takes place every day in most households yet few people would photograph it. But years later when Amazon is grown up, and Irem is an old crone it will remind them of a different time and place.
Most of us when taking pictures know how to pose groups, arrange smiles with a little ‘cheese’, or even snap a child playing with water in the garden. But the ordinary things that constitute what it means to be this parent, or this child in this family are overlooked.
One reason for this may be that we live our lives in colour, and unless going out to dinner those colours don’t always meld well together ~ indeed they clash! It never occurs to us to take photographs because of this since the image would be so untidy, and unsightly.
But documentary photographers have used black and white images for years. Indeed photographing in monochrome for them is so commonplace that many of us associate black and white images with pictures of historic events ~ true events that really happened, we think!
And you can do the same, if you wish.
For this photograph I used the black and white facility on the camera and snapped a quick .JPG using the Fuji FinePix E900′s small built in flash.
Light has a mysterious but predictable property. Every time you move your light source one unit of measurement distant from the subject you will require twice as much light from it to achieve the same exposure in your camera. Professional photographers refer to this as the inverse square law and in a studio they will take careful measurements of the lighting and position their lights carefully according to this law in order to obtain the lighting required.
In this image Amazon’s face was correctly exposed, but Irem being farther from the camera was looking decidedly dark and not because of dirt, or a suntan!
In the old days when I photographed using negative film I would correct this kind of problem by dodging out parts of the image that I wanted to lighten. Dodging is when you have the negative in the enlarger but hold back some of the light reaching the photographic paper either using your fingers, or pieces of black card on a wire handle.
Photographers such as Erwin Blumenfeld and Bill Brandt invariably manipulated their images using such techniques as dodging. Richard Avedon preferred to give his negatives to professional photographic printers but would write detailed directions of proof prints stating where he wanted light to be held back or added to areas of the final print.
Today this tool is available in most image editing software. Adobe Photoshop 7 allows you to set the size of the ‘dodging tool’ and the intensity by which you may hold back the light. In this case I lightened the higher part of Irem’s head so that her features would reproduce clearly, but not too much so that the image would appear unrealistic.
I could have made the final image lighter, but chose to use a duotone effect to add a little warmth to the picture. This has produced slightly muted lighting which to an untrained eye might resemble an available light picture.
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