If, like me, you love to use older film presets or if you just want to photograph a range of subjects, you need to be cognizant of the default toward lighter skin and how to correct it. Color film and digital color sensors don’t butcher darker skin tones anymore (hooray!), but we aren’t totally out of the woods yet. Technology has gotten better (although there have been some problems along the way). Thankfully, that is less of an issue now. So color film in its early stages pretty much developed around trying to measure the image against white skin.” In an NPR interview, photographer Syreeta McFadden explained, “A lot of was conceived with the idea of the best representation of white people.Īnd I don’t mean to say that it was a deliberate and exclusionary practice, but much more of a willful obliviousness, if you will. This created a situation in which photos of people with darker skin, especially photos with both lighter and darker skin tones in them, were very difficult to expose properly. Further, the dynamic range of Kodak film was biased toward lighter skin. ![]() So unless you processed your own images, they were developed to best complement light skin-no matter the skin tones or hues in your photos. ![]() There were many “Shirleys” over the decades (the name came from the original model)-but as you might assume, they were all fair-skinned Caucasian women. Before anyone goes and reports me for reverse racism, which isn’t a thing, lets talk about this in purely technical terms.įrom the 1950s well into the 1980s, Kodak, the standard in film processing, provided photo labs with “Shirley cards,” photos meant to be used to calibrate skin tones and light levels for photo printing. ![]() No, you’re not crazy: photographing darker skin tones, like mine, is harder than photographing lighter ones.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |