<p>The high school yearbook came out yesterday. This is a big budget affair, with all of the photographs in color. I noticed that in some-but not all-of the school pictures of the dark skinned kids, the kids were barely visible. One of them was even a senior picture (they use the same photographer for all of the Sr yearbook pictures.) There was one photo of an African American kid where you could pretty much just see the whites of his eyes and his smile, like some cartoon from the 30s…if I was his mother, I’d be so ticked!</p>
<p>Is it really so difficult to photograph dark skinned people? Seems like it would just be a matter of adjusting the lighting. Or is it the medium blue background that should be adjusted? Shouldn’t a professional photographer (even of the school picture variety) be able to do a better job?</p>
<p>In a word, yes. It is the contrast of shadows that makes the eye see the contours. It is difficult to get the camera to “see” shapes. (Think about photographing a drape. The shadows that allow your eye to see the folds in a black drape are not as contrasted as they would be if the drape were white.</p>
<p>A good tip for dark-skinned people (and all people for black and white photography) is to highlight the cheekbones, nose, forehead and chin to create low lights and create the impression of shape.</p>
<p>That must be why most of the dark skinned kids who didn’t show up well were boys…the girls were likely wearing makeup which created some contrasts.</p>
<p>I agree with Hunt, it was a case of sheer incompetence. If the photos were taken by a professional photographer, there’s just no excuse. It’s not like this potential problem hasn’t been known to exist in professional photography for years. If your specialty is photographing people, you must know how to light your subjects to overcome (or at least minimize) any and all adverse conditions. It’s not rocket science, it’s basic professional knowledge. I hope the decision has already been made by the School Administration never to hire this photographer again!</p>
<p>The problem may not lie with the actual photographer, but with lazy processing of the pictures. The photos could almost certainly have been adjusted to fix this problem.</p>
<p>Why blame the photographers? It could just as easily been a cheap printing job. Dark, low-contrast images are harder to represent no matter what, and bad printing is just as likely to be the cause as bad photography. The only way to tell would be to look at the original photo before it was printed in the yearbook. Betcha a nickel it looked fine.</p>
<p>It’s not as if our school is full of pale kids, with only one or two dark skinned kids. We have a very diverse student body and have for years, so the variety of skin tones sitting down before the photographer should not have been a surprise to him/her.</p>
<p>You could be right, WashDad. That would explain why the kid with only the eyes and smile showing picture didn’t do a retake of his school picture.</p>
<p>My H is a professional photog and shoots the kids’ school pics each year. We have a lot of kids with dark skin, and he just uses the correct lighting. His picx come out gorgeous. He does have to change the lighting, but he adjusts for each kid anyway. Your problem is probably just that. You can’t use snap shots with a camera that just flashes the same for each portrait. I would agree that I would be upset if those you described were my children.</p>
<p>It is just a matter of adjusting the lighting. It’s also easier to get good pictures of dark skinned people if you don’t put them in front of a white or very light background (because the camera will “read” the light background, and the adjust the shutter speed and/or flash to that instead of the dark skin).</p>
<p>If I were the kids’ and kids’ parents, I would be furious. The school needs to hire a competent photographer.</p>
<p>I’m just an amateur, but know how to take pictures so as to photograph people well regardless of their skin color.</p>
<p>I’ve seen lots of school pictures of kids, including dark skinned kids in nondiverse schools, and never have seen the kind of incompetence you describe. The photographer should be fired.</p>
<p>It’s not the background and it’s not the lighting, it’s the failure of the photographer to meter the correct thing. No matter how you light the subject, if the camera exposure setting is wrong you can still get a poor image. </p>
<p>The metering system of a camera wants to make the average brightness of the exposure to be 18% gray. This is why most people’s snow scenes come out gray instead of white – the poor camera expects the world to average out to 18% gray and the snow is much whiter than that (WashDad’s secret for bright-lit snow scenes: open up a couple of extra stops when shooting snow landscapes, or take three exposures at +1, +2, and +3 stops). When metering for people, I prefer to meter off the palm of a hand held right next to a subject’s face and then open up a stop. It turns out that everyone’s palm is just about the same color, regardless of skin tone in the face or even how tan or made-up someone is, and the palm is about twice as reflective as 18% gray. So, if you meter on a palm lit the same way as the face, and then open a stop you will get a perfectly exposed face. </p>
<p>Nowadays with auto-magic cameras I don’t know how you would do this, but I suppose trusting the computer is always the answer until it’s not.</p>