After three years of pestering him, my friend Doc finally let me photograph him yesterday. After a few frames, he declared it "wasn't so bad"... and by the end of our fifteen minute session, he was asking when we could do it again.
Doc may look rough around the edges (and he is) but he's really just an old softy. He works in the kitchen of a dainty tea shop, surrounded in a nightmare of pink things and ladies in hats.
Thanks, Brad. Yeah, Doc has a lot of stories, and a WHOLE lot of friends.
We shot this on an outdoor concrete balcony, one of my favorite places to shoot. It's got just about any kind of light you can imagine, depending on which direction you face.
Cheryl, this has a luminance and range of tones that I can only marvel at and which I never seem to get in my b&w shots. Care to share the extra details on "Tri-X in Tmax" ?
Thanks, guys. Robert, I've asked him about the tear drop tat. He winked and told me he just likes the way they look, and he likes that they scare people. LOL. Although Doc has never so much as been arrested, nobody messes with him.
Peter, I use a pretty straight up method for my B&W. Slight overexposure, slight underdevelopment, with developer at 74 degrees for meatier midtones. The rest is done with careful directional light and some fine-tuning via dodging and burning. Really, the light should do the vast majority of the work.