Light and Color

A few photos I took yesterday. I loved the way the sun lit up his blond hair so I used a silver reflector to light up the darker side of his face. I love the shadows and directional quality of the light (it was low in the sky). I am not a proponent of using on camera flash if you can help it. Often you can manipulate or position people to get the light to fall on the face the way you want and get different effects. When the sun went behind the clouds, I had less to work with. This time I blew out the sky in order to get enough light on his face. Sometimes black and white can really show the way the light falls in the photo:

 Here is a similar position, but I changed the colors in post processing a bit:

 I love the sky behind him here, and the silver reflector again brought punch to the photo by lighting him up on the camera side, so I didn't have to raise the exposure in order to get his skin tones lit up correctly (and then blow out the sky).

 In the following photos, the sun went behind the clouds and since he was moving around and I was moving to get different angles, we couldn't use the reflector. So I boosted the exposure in order to get him lit well enough:

 Do you see his adoring little fan in the last one? ;-) He was pretending the drain pipe was a "bazooka", and we were playing with the idea that he was heading into battle. He loved getting into action.

The last thing I will mention is that you might notice that the black and white photos are a bit more "punchy" looking than if you just clicked "grayscale" in your photo editing software. I intentionally worked with contrast, brightness, and the tone curve to bring down the darks and shadows to give a more textured feel.