A Quick And Dirty Fun Black And White Portrait Collage Tutorial

I seldom do black and white shots but my girlfriend found a shot in the internet of Chris Hemsworth (I know, I know….) and I needed to take my shot at it. So here is quick tutorial on a very simple, quick and cool black and white portrait shot.

What you need:

A flash (for this I used a 160watts studio strobe)
A Diffuser
A Camera (duh)

How to do it:

I guess this is not the best black and white conversion method that you can find out there, consider this more of a in camera fun and games. The first thing to do is to change the camera settings to monochrome . I am using Nikon, but the Canon or Sony (or any other camera) steps are very similar. Next, adjust the contrast to its highest setting.

For the background I used a white seamless paper (with the hopes that Amazon will let this one slide) because I wanted a really high contrast shot, but you can use any light colored wall. Placed your subject really close to the background – this will create a little bit of shadow of the subject in the background – not too much.

Place your lights on the camera axis above the model. I placed a studio strobe with a shoot thru umbrella above me, pointing 45 degrees downwards towards the model. The power of the strobe was at the lowest power. To fill in the shadows, place a reflector just beneath the model (( used an illustration board).

You can use whatever you want for triggering, I used the optical slave on the studio strobe which was triggered by the on camera flash set at 1/64. My camera was set to 1/160, f4 – 5.6, ISO 200

Took multiple photos of the subject (more than I need just to make sure I have extra photos). Make sure to give plenty of directions and keep changing poses. A way to turn this into a game is to ask the model to change a pose each time they hear the recycle beep.

Choose the shots you want to make a collage from. I used photoshop to open one picture, and when using the crop tool I expanded the white parts of the frame so I have enough space to place the pictures next to each other. Of course any other graphic program will do.