Overcast Senior Portrait

I had the pleasure of working with a very nice young lady over the weekend on her senior pictures. We shot at Monteith park and downtown Albany. We managed to avoid the rain. It was very cloudy though, which is great for diffusing light. That helps avoid harsh shadows and lights the subject more evenly. This is my favorite of the shoot. The color version is nice too, but I really like the black and white. It was shot with a very wide aperture for a nice blurred background and a reflector held just off camera to the lower right to fill in some light on her face. 

Selective Color

Last week, I did a senior portrait shoot for a young man. I had shown him the finished color shots as well as several I also picked to create black and white versions of. The client asked if I could do some of the shots with only him in color and the background in black and white. I agreed that would work well for several of the photos. I ended up doing a few of these "selective color" versions. As you can see in the shot below, having a colorful subject while everything else around him is in shades of gray really makes him pop. It can really help with a more distracting background, which wasn't the case here though.