[Leica] Photographing Black People

[Chris Crawford]

I decided to start a new thread for this, which came from the Peter Lik
thread. Black people are not hard to photograph, in my experience, but it
seems like most people have troubles with it. The high school I taught at
two years ago was about 50% black. The yearbooks the kids got really pissed
me off. Most of my students were rendered as black blobs with nothing but
eyes and teeth visible. These were done by so-called professional
photographers in a studio! Part of that is undoubtedly poor printing by the
yearbook publisher, but there no excuse for that either.

The big thing with blacks, or any other dark-skinned people is DO NOT
UNDEREXPOSE, not even a tiny bit. Black people are not really black; they
vary from dark brown to light brown. Even the darkest-skinned black people
are not black, but they¹re close enough to the point on a films
characteristic curve that any underexposure of them drops the skin tone
below the point where detail is rendered.

What I do when photographing black people with negative film, color or BW,
is meter the darkest part of the person¹s hair. Regardless of skin tone,
virtually all black people have hair that really is black. You don¹t want
that underexposed. I meter the hair and set it at Zone III. I usually want
the skin at Zone IV or even V. This might be overexposing, but its ok.

With digital, its easier. I just use my Minolta Flash Meter IV incident
meter. its readings are perfect, even for dark skin. This was done at ISO
3200 in my Canon 5DmkII, incident reading.
http://chriscrawfordphoto.com/chris-details.php?product=1703

The kids in the photo were some of my former students. I ran into them at a
carnival the summer after I had them in my 9th grade English class at South
Side High School. They saw me taking pictures and asked me to do one of
them. I promised them a set of prints when school started in the fall, and
on the first day of school they found me at school and asked for their
pictures!

Another problem I saw was photofinishing. When I was in college, I worked in
a one-hour photo lab at a Meijer store. Meijer is a big-box super center
chain in the midwest. Our Fuji minilabs had a video monitor so we could
individually color/density correct each photo if we wanted. This took too
long for one-hour service, but we had some customers who asked for it and
were willing to wait. Most of the time, the machine¹s full-auto mode did
fine with white people, but black people were rendered VERY orange! It
didn¹t print them too dark, but the color was wacky. I felt bad giving those
photos to customers. They deserved better.

What I ended up doing was telling the black customers that I wanted to print
their film manually because the machine screwed up black people¹s skin color
(I had a couple of examples to show them). If things were busy, I¹d ask if
it was ok for me to take longer than an hour to make sure their photos
looked great. No one ever objected to the wait, and most of them said they¹d
gotten the same bad photos at other labs too and had just assumed that¹s the
way the film rendered them. I built up a big clientele of black families who
brought their film to the store I worked at, and asked for me to do their
film. Some of them spread the word in the community, and we had a lot of
them who drive a long way to get here rather than going to stores closer to
where they lived.

I don¹t know why the machines couldn¹t have been programmed to print black
folks correctly, but it certainly didm;t have to be that way. I made them
look natural in the prints I made. I haven¹t worked in a photo lab in 15
years. I imagine with digital things have changed. None of the labs here
even process film anymore, they just print digital files, and usually they
just print the file without correcting it, so hopefully black people¹s skin
is no longer orange in their photos!

-- 
Chris Crawford
Fine Art Photography
Fort Wayne, Indiana
260-437-8990

http://www.chriscrawfordphoto.com  My portfolio

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Christopher-Crawford/48229272798
Become a fan on Facebook