This is my entry for the #monomad challenge - Black & White Portraiture

Happy weekend everyone!! It's been awhile again I've posted an entry to this community. Since my last post I've seen the quality of post has change and a lot of quality photo's been published in this community. I'm glad that I've come to know this community thanks to my friend @tommyl33 for inviting me to participate in this #monomad challenge a few months ago. I'll try to keep up with the current trend and try to push myself to create more quality photo's.

My post entry today is a black and white portraiture which is taken in the early year of 2017 together with @tommyl33 and @tawadak24. During our early days in photography, we were very active in organizing a photo session and our friend, @callmelula became our regular model for most of our photo session. That year, all three of us has taken a photography course for a year thanks to @tommyl33 again for contacting us in the last minute to take this course which is also a last minute notice @tommyl33 has seen in the Facebook ads from one of the academy here in Kota Kinabalu city. So, in order to finish this course, we were required to conduct a lot of photo session and this portrait session is one of the many session that we have during the course of this lesson.

In this session that we organized, we experiment with many lighting setup from 1 light up to 3 lights in the studio environment. In this photo that I've uploaded, I used 1 and 2 light setup with the honeycomb beauty dish to create that dramatic lighting. If I'm not mistaken, this light was setup by @tommyl33 and I took advantage to take a few photo's to see what it's look like in a camera. Turns out the final output is quite to my liking. This is the learning process that we have during our time taking this photography course for a year. By this time, I think we have not learn the editing part yet. We were self thought in photo editing during this time because our instructor has told us that we must learn the lighting first to get it right before we proceed to the editing part.

Along my journey in this photography course, I started to learn that selecting a photo to edit has to be based on the technical aspect of photo taken. The composition, the expression, the lighting. Another one that is very crucial to me is the resonation of the photo with me. How to I feel about that particular photo? What sort of story to tell? What sort of emotion to convey? It's easy to take a photo with the right setup but to put a reason or story to the photo is another thing. That's when storytelling become another important aspect to consider when finalizing a work. This is the aspect that i constantly need learning until today albeit without a consistency on my part and i determined to improve this.

The process of selecting a photo for me is base on the feeling I have on the particular photo, does it resonate with me or not and most of the time this is my biggest obstacle to complete an edit of a photo because most of the photo that i taken does not resonate with me or perhaps my mind is not in the right condition for that particular photo selection. And i have to postponed the process of selecting the photo to do the final edit. Sometimes it's takes a few days, few months and just like this photo i uploaded takes me 5 years to resonate with me. Maybe I'm to harsh to myself on the work that I have done because when i let others select the photo I've taken, they seems to like most of it. This is the aspect that I'm still improving until now. Me myself is the biggest and strongest critic to my own work.

This is the few photo that I selected for my entry today. The details of this photo are as follow:

Model: @callmelula Fellow photographer: @Tommyl33 @tawadak24

Camera
Canon 60D	18mm - 180mm f3.5 - f5.6

Editing Software
Capture One 21 Pro 14.4.0.101

Do go and visit their personal page too. They have a lot of interesting posting in their blog that might have your interest from photography to cryptocurrency current trends.

By the way, 15% beneficiary will be allocated to the model. I hope she can grow much faster and better in hive community with your support. Thanks!!!! Until the next posting which might be very soon to publish again 😁 My post interest in black and white photography mostly on people, stories of my experience on a travel or work and also maybe a bit of portraiture in monochrome.