Of black & whites and portraits

I have a thing about black & white photos. In fact, black & white photography is one of my favourites!
Over the years I've taken countless numbers of black & white photos, most of which are portraits.
Here, you can see three of my favourite shots that I took when I went to San Francisco, USA a couple of years back, when I did my piercing course.
I took these at night when I was taking a stroll around Union Square in San Francisco. These street musicians caught my ears... and eyes... so I decided to take some shots of them. The surrounding and the whole atmosphere that time made for a perfect “setting” for these shots.
Looking back, I was just a freshie that time. I just started taking interest in photography for three months then.
I didn't have a speed light because my priority then was a 17-55mm F2.8 Nikkor lens. Also, I had to keep things on a minimum because I needed to save up or otherwise I would never have been able to survive in the States.
When I messaged one of my friends and told her about my blog ideas, she asked if I could post some tips about portraitures and landscapes. I decided to go with portraits first. :)

So here's what I do for portraitures:

1. I don't fancy shots of people posing for the camera. I personally prefer candids. For these shots, I took them when the musicians were playing.

2. Focus on the eyes... To take good portraits, try focusing on the subject's eyes, because the eyes, like they say, are the “windows of the soul”.

And those were all that I did for these shots. As for post-processing, I prefer black & whites or sephia because of the feel and intensity they create. Here's what I did:

1. I shot in RAW, then used Lightroom 2 to convert the colour photos into monochrome shots.

2. But it didn't just end there. Some adjustments were done to the shots. I boosted the contrast using the tone curve to bring out textures and give the shots some “drama”.

3. To finish things off, I added some vignettes. - Frank