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May 2000

The Profit in B&W Portraiture by Jeff Smith
Black and White is the Latest and Greatest for Seniors

There is no question that black-and-white images are very popular and a necessary option for most studios today. Seniors want black and whites in their sessions, business people and models need them for publications. The question is how do you offer them, without reducing your potential for profit?

If you shoot your portraiture on black-and-white film, the processing and printing costs force you to charge more for your black and white than your color. And that's if you can find a quality black-and-white printer to handle your work in the first place.

While some photographers have found a niche, creating high priced black and white, most photographers find that a majority of clients won't pay a higher price for options like black and white. Some photographers think, "Oh well, if they don't want to pay for it, to bad!" Since we specialize in seniors, options like black and whites, going to outdoor locations or including a friend, all add profit to each order, by increasing the sale. So why would a photographer charge a small fee that keeps a majority of their clients from creating ideas and options that increase profit?
To overcome the cost of travel to and from outdoor locations, we schedule overlapping session times and blocks of appointments at the same location, on the same day. This way we are working with more than one client at a time outdoors, just like at the studio, and the cost of travel is divided by 10 to 12 sessions. To offer black and white without charging an additional fee, we shoot all of our black and white on Kodak T-Max 400CN.

Unlike the C-41-process black and white films of the past, the 400CN can be printed to create black-and-white tones, without your lab taking your name in vain. The film provides good tonal range and contrast. The best part is that it is printed on color paper, so you don't have to increase your prices or lower your potential for profit.

The Look of Monochrome
Now I am much more careful about going to the special locations of my clients. I ask a lot of questions about the direction of the wind, the direction of the light, what structural elements are in the background (i.e. houses, businesses) and how populated the location will be at the designated session time. If possible, I will scout the location in advance to make sure the location matches the client's description. To make the extra juggling required for an "away" session, I charge twice as much for the sitting fee. It is very simple logic for the client to follow: "When I go to your location I can photograph only one session during prime time sunset light, but when I use one of my locations I am able to photograph two."

Black-and-white image creates a specific look. There is much more that goes into creating a salable black-and-white image than simply changing film backs. When you take a business portrait or publication photo, the only reason the portrait needs to be in black and white is to make the final printing process easier. When a client decides to take a black-and-white image, they have done so because of the look or style it creates.

Just like you must coordinate a client's clothing to the color and style of any scene in the studio or at an outdoor location, you need to also coordinate the look produced by black and white to all the other elements in the portrait. If you take a black-and-white portrait of a young lady, in a sweater, posed in a classic yearbook pose, with an "old masters" type background it cries publication photo. But if you take the same young lady and change the sweater to a leather jacket, the pose from a "classic" pose to a more fashionable pose and the background to one that is more stylish, and you have just created a contemporary portrait with a sense of style.

When a portrait achieves a sense of style it visually makes sense. There are many elements in any given portrait to control. We are going to be discussing the four most important elements.

The most important element of any portrait is the client's clothing, because it must be coordinated with every other element. For black-and-white images, the clothing, whether it is casual or more upscale, should be selected to achieve a unique look. Leather, denim, flannel, silk, satin, lace or shears all work well with the look of black and white.The second element is the scene or background. Whether the portrait is created in the studio or an outdoor location, the look of the background should be suited for the look of black-and-white. Backgrounds in the studio should be very simple with no texture (black, white or silver paper) or have a great deal of texture. We paint many of our backgrounds for this very reason. While many of the soft backgrounds that are sold by the various companies are fine for color, they don't produce the proper feeling in the black-and-white portrait.

When we use black and white outdoors, again we look for scenes that generate a unique feeling. Simple foliage or having the guy or girl leaning against a tree isn't necessarily right for a black-and-white portrait. Outdoor scenes that have exposed wood, brick, rocks or heavy stucco all work well for this type of portrait. Urban scenes (railroad tracks, old warehouses/buildings, overpasses, etc.) are ideal for the outdoor black-and-white image.

The third element of a black and white image is the pose. The two types of poses that work the best with black and whites are casual poses and glamour poses. Casual poses are resting poses. The subject's chin rests on the hands or shoulders, the arms on the knees. Casual poses usually have the subject sitting or leaning. The best teacher of this type of posing is to watch people, observing how they relax. When someone is watching TV, talking on the phone or having a picnic they naturally fall into some of the greatest casual poses for you to use in your portraits, if you just take the time to pay attention.

The second type of pose is the glamour pose. The sole purpose of the glamour pose is to make the person look appealing in a sensual way. If the portrait is full length, the body is posed to accentuate certain parts of the human anatomy. The best source of glamour poses are fashion magazines and lingerie catalogs.

The final element is your style or approach to photographing a client in black and white. To add a more stylish look to my studio lighting, I have covered our posing tables with Mylar to act as a reflector. The posing tables are actually drafting tables. I like the fact that the angle of a drafting table can be raised or lower to increase or decrease the amount of light being reflected up from the Mylar. This light smoothes the complexion, adds a second small catch-light in the lower eye and adds more of a fashionable look to the lighting, which is perfect for black-and-white images.
We also use two other types of lighting that work very well with black and white. The first is Butterfly Lighting, which is placing the mainlight right over the camera, with a slight downward tilt. You position the camera to shoot between the mainlight above and the tabletop below.

The second type of lighting for black and whites in the studio are spot lights. In our studio, we use grid spots on many of our black-and-white portraits. This type of lighting gives a more theatrical look to the portraits, with its heavy shadows and increased contrast. Most of the time, the entire portrait is lit with one grid spot. When using grid spots, you position the light close enough to see the light fall off around the subject or toward the edges of the frame and low enough to produce catchlights in their proper position.

When lighting the outdoor portrait, you need a harder than normal lighting. While working with the ultrasoft light provided by the open sky in shaded areas works with color images, black and whites, especially using the T-Max 400CN need a little more snap. We look for brighter scenes and use the gold side of a 72-inch gold and white reflector to add more contrast to the natural light that exists.

I diffuse most of my color images, but I almost never diffuse black and white. Any automated type of black-and-white printing, whether you shoot T-Max 400CN or have automated prints printed from black-and-white negatives don't have the needed contrast for diffusion.

We normally rate T-Max at 320. Always expose for the shadows. Many photographers who learn photography using slide film expose for the highlight. Whatever the meter reading is from the main light source is what they set the camera settings to. Slide film has more tonal range, so the shadow still records detail. Negative film, including T-Max 400CN can be overexposed by two stops and still produce a usable negative, while it can only be underexposed by a stop. If you set the camera to what your meter is reading (exposing for the highlight), the shadow, which is typically 111ž42 to 2 stops less light than the highlight, will not record to printable levels on negative film. So if the mainlight reads f/11, we set the camera at f/8 or one stop over, so both the highlight and shadow will record on the negative.
Since we specialize in senior portraiture, we use a 645 format. The negative is large enough for quality retouching and the negative size can produce up to a 24x30 prints, which is large enough for every senior I have ever photographed. For most of our portraiture we use the 150mm portrait lens. For our black-and-white images, there are two other lenses that we use quite often-a 250mm and a 50mm. Both lenses produce a unique perspective which works extremely well with the look of black and white.

The 250mm adds impact to the subject by throwing everything in the immediate foreground and background out of focus. This is the lens of choice outdoors, when I am working with scenes that lack a feeling of depth.

Wide-angle lenses are usually used when an entire scene needs to be captured to complete the appeal, but the distortion that is possible with a wide-angle lens makes for a very unique look. When we use a wide-angle lens, we have some element extending to the camera. This leads the eye right in to the subject. We found the most effective way to pose the subject, is to extend the subject's legs (especially if a person is shorter) toward the camera. This elongates the legs and uses the distortion of the lens to not only create an interesting line, but add length to the legs, which is appreciated by most ladies.

Only when you coordinate all the elements of a portrait to achieve the desired look or style do you create a portrait that has a true sense of style. Then you must take those portraits and be able to sell them at a good profit to each of your clients to raise the profit potential of your business. There are many good ideas out there, but as a business person, as well as a photographer, these ideas must be practical achievable. Offering high quality black-and-white images is a unique option that many of your clients will enjoy taking advantage of. If you shoot black and white properly, you will enjoy that added profit from a majority of your sessions and not just a few clients who don't mind spending more for their session!

Jeff Smith owns and operates Jeff Smith's Photoique in Fresno, California. The studio now has its own web site, which features articles by Smith and other information: www.jeffsmithphoto.com.