Welcome to the latest in our series A Portrait of Thame… Thame Rotary Club.

For this image in the A portrait of Thame series, I visited Marius who is in charge of (amongst many other roles) Public Relations for the Rotary Club.

I visited Marius at his beautiful family home which was to be the location for the image you see above. Thame Rotary Club is the local branch of one of the world’s largest voluntary organisations. The club organise events in and around the Thame area such as the Swimathon which raised over £4000 earlier this year.

I knew that for this image I wanted to try something a little different and return to my roots as a black and white portrait photographer. Many years ago while I was studying photography at college, I fell in love with the black and white medium and I wanted to try and rekindle some memories of that time in this image. I felt that the best way to achieve this was to use a plain coloured wall so that it would convert easily and unobtrusively in the final image. Fortunately, Marius had just such a wall in his home.

Despite it being a beautifully bright spring day in the rural Oxfordshire countryside, to ensure that the image was captured as I wanted it to be, I needed to supplement the light bouncing around Marius’ light and airy home with some flash from my Canon 600EX-RT fired through a softbox to camera left and triggered with the ST E3-RT.

The softbox was feathered across the face rather than being fired directly straight on. To fire straight on would have produced much harsher shadows. This image was shot with a shutter speed of 1/160th of a second at f9. I knew that I needed to pose Marius in such a way that his t-shirt showed off the Rotary Club logo on the upper left whilst being easy to read. This meant turning Marius towards the flash and then asking him to turn his head back towards me.

Once I had the image the black and white conversion was done using Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 software, enabling me full control over the conversion process. All in all, I am pleased with this final image as it feels very similar in style to the images I was producing during my college days.

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