[Leica] Photographing Black People

[Henning Wulff]

A very nice shot, Chris, and definitely correctly exposed!

Henning


On 2015-02-22, at 5:28 PM, Chris Crawford <chris at chriscrawfordphoto.com> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
> 
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Henning Wulff
hjwulff at gmail.com