Laura in Black and White
A portrait of Laura in black and white, taken last weekend at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville, Tennessee. If you are curious, the waterfall in the background is the same one seen in the Tropical Waterfall post from the other day.
I usually prefer color photos instead of black and white. It’s a personal thing, and I have nothing against you if you prefer to create black-and-white photos. I actually like them, but I have a hard time letting go of the colors in my photos. But every now and then I give it a try, and I liked how this one turned out.
And when I do create a black and white photo, I don’t usually share the color version, too. But just this once, here it is:
I shared the color version mainly so that you could see the color of Laura’s shirt, because apparently that was a popular color this year.
Our church’s group always gets matching t-shirts to wear to the Lads to Leaders Convention each year, and apparently most of the other groups do, too. Our group leader Matt said that someone told him, “We finally got a good shirt color!” Personally, I have liked the green, black, dark red, and other color shirts that we have had in the past, so I didn’t necessarily like this color any better than those others. It’s not that I don’t like it, but rather just that I liked the others, too. I guess I don’t know all that much about shirt colors.
Usually, it is easy to quickly spot other people from our group by looking for shirts like ours. But this year, that didn’t quite work out, either. Because some other group had shirts of the exact same color, and they even also had a white pocket logo on the front of the shirt and white artwork on the back. So although up close the people were obviously not from our group, and the artwork on the shirts wasn’t the same, from a distance I had to look twice a few times to see if those were people from our group up ahead.
I guess someone forgot to call dibs on the blue shirts this year!
A mocker seeks wisdom and doesn’t find it, but knowledge comes easily to the perceptive. - Proverbs 14:6
About the Photo
As mentioned earlier, this photo was taken at the same location as the earlier waterfall photo. However, in between the two photos, I made a quick lens change. While I used the 14-42mm zoom lens on the waterfall photo to get more in the frame, I switched to the 25mm prime lens here to take advantage of its shallow depth of field in order to isolate Laura from the background a bit. You can read a little more about that in both Finding Your Focal Length and Understanding Aperture from Steve’s Photography Tips.
I didn’t spend much time on the color version of the photo at all. If I had, I would have made it less green and increased the warm tones a bit. But since it wasn’t the main focus here, I didn’t worry about that too much.
And yes, it is purely a coincidence that the color of the shirts matches the background of the Steve’s Photography Tips graphic on this page. Hmm, maybe I should get some shirts of my own made in that color.
Photo: A single Raw exposure, processed in Photoshop. Read more about photography tips, photo software, camera gear, and more at Steve’s Photography Tips.
Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M10
Lens: Olympus M.Zukio 25mm f1.8
Date: March 25, 2016
Location: Gaylord Opryland Resort, Nashville, Tennessee
