Shades of Gray

Max Photography. has added a photo to the pool:

The 2012 Canberra Photo Marathon was a really fun event. You get given 12 themes to interpret in a day. For the theme "Shades of Gray" this year, I used a simple one light setup against a black reflective wall. Essentially an umbrella was used, configured to feather the light onto the subject's face and wall at camera left. The ambient was cut out using shutter speed to the point where only a shimmer of the diffused sunlight appeared on the black umbrella's bottom right and top. So how do you make your colours pop in camera if you're shooting only jpeg? For a start, you set the jpeg picture settings to vivid (Nikon) and further fine tune the saturation/contrast. Then...you use strobes! Strobes make it easier to get contrast in an image as you are essentially making two exposures (background, foreground). By having independent control over the two, you can alter the transition of tones from dark to white, and even gel the flash to increase the range of tones in the image - all of which increases contrast. The less the range of tones, the less contrast in the image. The camera's histogram comes in tremendously handy for this. Deliberately underexposing the shot a little can also bring out the richness of the colours.

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