Geoff

Canon 60d, Carl Zeiss 100mm Makro, f3.2, 1/125, iso 800, no flash

I really like taking candid photos of people.  Geoff doesn't realized that I captured his image while he was talking to my daughter.  Maybe now he does.  Heh.  We see him here wearing a blazer and a tie.  Very GQ.  And the outfit really looks good on him.  But in reality he hates suits and ties.  Probably the only reason he wears them is the dress code for elders in our church.  In a few years, he'll be retiring from serving as an elder and for sure he'll ditch the outfit and go back to short sleeve oxfords and perhaps a James Dean jacket in case of cold spells.  He really is a cowboy in a twisted kind of way.  Actually, he takes care of his cows - that is milk producing cows.

This was taken inside the church kitchen, which surprisingly has great lighting.  The windows opposite him and the lights above provided the soft lighting for this shot.  You can see some reflection on his head, and his face has enough shadows and highlights that I think make this photo work.  Considering that he is wearing  eyeglasses, I'm surprised to see that I can see enough details on his eyes.  Usually, it's hard to get good definition on portrait shots with people wearing eyeglasses because of the reflection.  I think because his head was facing slightly side way help avoid any harsh light from the window that may have added unwanted reflection on his eyeglasses.  Also, since he is looking to his left -- this and the combination of his broad shoulder help create a nice masculine appeal.  (They say it's the opposite for women.  You want them looking to on the right.)  The details on his hand is awesome.  I love that you can see the knuckles.

Everything was shot manually - focus and exposure.  Not much post processing was done except tweaking the curves and employing noise reduction in Lightroom 3.4.1.  I used to avoid shooting over iso 400 but with LR, I'm able to easily remove noise at iso 1600.  Conversion to BW was done using Color Efex.  Typically, I use Silver Efex, which is great for vintage film effects,  but for this one I wanted to get a more modern BW look.

I'm really happy with this image.
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Comments

Anonymous said…
Is he taken?
Rob Castro said…
Heh... very much so...
tell you what I'll hook you up with my friend Marley
Marley said…
eh dude... was dat yoo tellin hebout muh gran mama? huv sum decency foh cryin out loud

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