Nice photos, I really like 3 & 5.


As far as the B & W goes, there a few simple things you can do to help that out.


1) Make sure as you process the raw that your histogram is filled from one end to the other. Slight clipping on either end won't kill you. Dad's shirt collar can be blown out slightly and that won't hurt the overall image. So increase exposure in post until that happens. I treat the exposure compensation as a highlight controller. If the histogram is not clipped at the bottom, there should be a black level or similar slider to stretch the histogram toward the dark end. We'll call that the shadow controller. I'd say by the look of dad's jacket your already there.


2) If you have it, open a curves dialog and push up the straight line in the middle to push up the mid-tones. The image should look overall much brighter but the highlights are clipped where they are. Do this until your comfortable with the skin luminosity.


3) If you have a way to desaturate in raw processing do that. Then change the white balance from one end of the scale to the other and watch what happens to the B&W tones as you do so. This is the way I apply color filters while processing raw.


I hope you don't mind. I downloaded you image and looked at the histogram. I would say due to dad's collar the image was severly underexposed. 1-2 stops. I did a little post in CS3 with levels and some vignetting....





Nice shot...good composition...beautiful subjects.....what more could a photographer ask for?