Shooting With Mono In Mind | Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey is a freelance photographer, writer and trainer of all things photographic. His work is regularly featured in photography magazines, websites and videos.
Gavin has a real passion for sharing his photography and Photoshop knowledge. In 2008 he started recording and uploading video tutorials to YouTube. These quickly gained a large following and to date his videos have been viewed over 20 million times.
In 2010 Gavin was the winner of Adobe’s “Next Photoshop Evangelist” competition and since then he has given training demonstrations in Photoshop, Lightroom and Photoshop Elements in the UK, Europe and the US.
In 2012 Gavin joined forces with Adorama as a presenter on Adorama TV, where he inspires and teaches photographers from around the world in the art of photography and post processing.

Black and white portraits with bold shapes and tones ranging from the brightest whites to deep blacks can be incredibly powerful. By removing the color in the image, the contrast becomes far more important. But there’s a lot more to making a quality monochrome portrait than adjusting the image in Photoshop. If you plan ahead, you can work with basic but graphically bold backgrounds and maximize the contrast in your image with some carefully worked lighting.

That’s exactly what photographer Gavin Hoey takes you through in this video tutorial. He starts with some simple camera set-up tips to help you pre-visualize your mono photos long before you press the shutter. Then he moves on using a simple solid black background with a separation light to stop his model and background from blending in.

Next Gavin switches to a grey seamless paper background. Here he shows you how to work with the paper background to get bold black and white portraits using just a single flash at first and then by adding a second light for just the background.

Finally, Gavin moves on to the plain white wall for his studio. Making a white wall photograph as pure, bright white takes a little bit of careful metering but as Gavin demonstrates, once you know the secret your white backgrounds will always be perfectly white.

Interested in learning more about backgrounds and how they can be used to evolve your shoots? Take a look at these guides on 42 West: