The vintage-looking portrait you see above of jazz trumpeter Tom MacNiven was the result of a happy accident. Back in 2016, I was shooting with two black X-T1 cameras that looked identical. I had been asked to shoot a set of promotional pictures of Tom for an upcoming set of concerts. After setting up my background, lights, and modifiers, I asked Tom to stand in position so I could set the power of my lights. I grabbed an X-T1 from my bag and attached the 56mm f1.2 lens, raised it to my eye and took a test shot. The picture was overexposed, but I noticed that the colours were way oversaturated and looked strange. Then I realised I had picked up the camera that I had used the day before with Fujifilm’s miniature effect engaged. I had forgotten to follow my own advice and reset the camera so it was ready to shoot straight out of the bag. I quickly switched out of miniature mode and carried on with the shoot.
It wasn’t until I imported the pictures into Lightroom that night that I realised there was potential in this picture. It was way overexposed, but to my amazement, I was able to pull the exposure down and retain detail in the highlights. I played around with the colours, but the miniature effect jacks the colours up to give that toy look. So I converted it to black and white using my homemade LR preset with the catchy title of ‘ Contrasty B&W Split Tone +V’ (my presets tend to do what they say in the title). The +V just means a vignette is included. I then made a few other tweaks to clarity and sharpness and the results are what you see above. I used Nik Silver Efex Pro2 to add the frame.