Innholdsfortegnelse for #9 Portrait i Improve Your Photography

The powerful black & white portraits shot by Peter Müller combine a sense of emotion with conveying the essence of his subjects. What is almost unique about Peter’s work is that he likes to get it right in-camera, first time, without any need to retouch his images later on. Peter has built a reputation as one of Europe’s finest portrait photographers and cites his main influences as the late Peter Lindbergh and fellow Rotolight ‘Master of Light’ Greg Gorman. To help to creatively light his portraits Peter regularly deploys the range of Rotolight LED lights, all of which also offer High Speed Sync (HSS) flash capabilities. For his studio work he tends to rely on either the Anova PRO 2 or the AEOS units. In order to supplement natural light…

Working as a professor of Inorganic Chemistry in the chemistry department of the University of Patras in Greece, Vassilis Tangoulis is rather fond of experiments. Around 15 years ago, he developed a passion for black & white photography, and started playing around with long exposures to add a fourth dimension, time, to his work. Vassilis was born in the Greek town of Karpenisi, surrounded by pine-clad mountains and wide, busy rivers. He left the settlement at the age of 11, but what he experienced in those formative years helped to shape his understanding of the natural world. For more than two decades now he’s lived in Patras, a picturesque city at the foot of Mount Panachaikon. Here he finds plenty of subject matter to satisfy his hunger for minimalist landscapes…

In the heyday of film, there were large manufacturers operating all across the globe. When digital photography appeared on the scene at the outset of the new millennium, the sales of film declined, resulting in some established manufacturers going out of business while others drastically changed their business model. Fast forward to 2018, however, and film has bounced back in a big way. This ‘awakening’ has been taking place over several years and all over the globe. Perhaps spurred on by the curiosity of a younger generation raised on digital, we are seeing an increasing number of people discovering or rediscovering this fabulous format. Scanned film shots are appearing with increasing regularity on social media – all of which means there are a growing number of people shooting on film,…

When it comes to converting images to black & white, there are lots of options available to you. Over the next few pages, we’ll explore some of the best tools for black & white in Adobe’s photography range. Whether you use Lightroom, Photoshop or Elements, here you’ll find advice not just on how to convert, but also how to fine-tune the look of your monochrome images. Often this is more than just about removing the colour, it’s also about tweaking the conversion, controlling the contrast, adjusting the shadows and highlights, and selectively dodging and burning. These tools are not difficult to master, and even an image-editing novice can make stunning monochrome photos in minutes. Use Black and White Profiles Available both in Lightroom and in Camera Raw, the Profile Browser…

While much success comes from how you process black & white images, you can certainly give yourself a helping hand from a shooting perspective, too. For starters, while black & white has gone from a restriction to a creative choice, like any choice, it should be made carefully. Picking the right moments to use it should be key. It’s a treatment that should emphasise and enhance what you want to show in the subject, never disguise the shortcomings of a scene. Simplicity should be a driving force, too. Without colour to distract attention, the viewer’s focus will immediately be concentrated on the shape and contrast in an image, so in many ways composition becomes even more demanding. As with any technique or subject, experience will help you ‘see’ subjects that’ll…

Great Britain is a small island. But with its diminutive size comes great privilege, because here we’re never more than 70 miles from the sea. And the morethan 7,500 miles of coastline that surround us are varied, enchanting and exhilarating. Why else would so many photographers gravitate to it in order to fulfil their desire to make images? With the coastline’s beauty, however, also comes risk – both for those who make their livings from the sea and for those who head there to make the most of their time off. In 2016 alone, the RNLI made more than 8,800 launches and saved the lives of 558 people. It’s for this reason that the service – which has volunteers at its core – is respected so entirely by British people,…

In 2018, British photographer Alys Tomlinson was named as the winner of the Sony World Photography Awards (WPA). A first-time entrant, she won for her project ‘Ex Voto’, which documented pilgrims to the famous holy site at Lourdes. Her work combines portraiture with landscape photography to document the annual pilgrimages made by Christians. The name comes from the ex votos – small trinkets or mementos – left at the sites as signs of the pilgrims’ faith and devotion. Unsurprisingly, since winning the prize, Alys has been very busy. Not only did she return to Lourdes to take additional images, but she also visited Ballyvourney and Grabarka, in Ireland and Poland, respectively, all of which resulted in the book Ex Voto (GOST Books). What is perhaps a little more surprising is…

Some years ago, Advanced Camera Services contacted me to tell me they were converting DSLRs into infrared cameras. The basic process involved removing the infrared blocking filter and replacing it with an infrared narrow-pass filter that allows certain wavelengths of light through to the sensor. I was interested to see the results, but when the camera arrived all I could picture were the hard blacks and bleached whites of the infrared photographs I had made as a photography student many years ago. The camera they sent me was the Nikon D70 with a little 6MP sensor. Having agreed to do this, I decided to visit a location I often went to as a student, Formby Point in Merseyside, with the sole intention of exploring infrared again. It was spring time…

It was as an enthusiastic member of the Fujiholics (later rebranded as Fotoholics) group that I first came across the work of Matt Walkley, a dedicated and talented photographer, who is particularly skilled at landscape work. He would later go on to become the runner-up in our inaugural Rising Star Bursary Award. I caught up with Matt via video call to hear more about his impressive body of work to date and find out more about his intriguing processes. Like many before him, Matt was initially inspired by arguably the grandfather of landscape photography, Ansel Adams, whom Matt read about one day in a bookshop. Realising photography would be an easier way to express his creativity than drawing, he started going out with a camera with the specific intention of…

Few Photoshop tasks are as rewarding as restoring an old photo. There’s something deeply satisfying about breathing new life into damaged prints, so that they can be cherished for years to come. Whether you’re restoring snaps from your own family album or as a favour for someone else, it leaves you with a glow as warm as the gorgeous sepia tones in these treasured old mementos. For users of Photoshop Elements, there are a host of powerful restoration tools on offer. Retouching tools such as the Healing brushes and Clone tool are ideal for fixing marks and scratches, and the tonal commands make it easy to enhance and sharpen faded old details. Even heavy-duty restoration work such as repairing ripped prints is possible with simple layer and masking skills. Over…

As a photographer who continually strives to push the creative boundaries in his work, Steve Gosling set himself a new challenge that allowed him to approach landscape scenes in a fresh and unique way. This image of the iconic Durdle Door arch in Dorset is one of many landscapes taken on a Zero 2000 pinhole camera. What initially started out as a bit of fun, quickly resulted in articles, interviews, exhibitions and his book, Lensless Landscapes. He tells us, ‘It wasn’t driven by any commercial considerations; it was motivated simply by my interest in exploring different creative approaches to keep my vision fresh.’ So without an exposure mode or LCD in sight, it was back to basics with a vengeance. When it came to choosing his new tool, Steve opted…

Gone are the days of sloshing chemicals around in a darkroom lit by the dim red glow of a safelight. Black & white photography in the digital age is quick and easy in comparison to the days of film, with almost endless possibilities available with a single raw file. And while Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop offer excellent controls for converting images to monochrome, the Silver Efex Pro 2 Photoshop plug-in has been a firm favourite with amateur and professional photographers for decades. Silver Efex Pro 2 is one of eight plug-ins that make up Nik Collection 3 by DxO, which is arguably the best Photoshop plug-in suite available. Without going into a huge amount of detail, the plug-in suite offers both basic preset-based and advanced manual control over…

As a medium, black & white photography is as strong today as it’s ever been. But things do change. These days there are lots of tools and techniques for achieving that classic black & white film look, from Lightroom tools to in-camera tricks and plug-ins that replicate particular film stocks, right down to the specific grain structure. Over the next few pages, we’ll explore some of the best options. When it comes to image editing, the term ‘effect’ is sometimes seen as a dirty word. But an effect is exactly what a black & white conversion is. Granted, it’s probably the most universally accepted of all image effects, but in the digital age it’s an aesthetic choice rather than the practical necessity it was in the early days of photography.…