Not by using a pink lightbulb in the room for a woman to soften the tones, or a green one for a man to bring out his rugged good looks? Hmmmm, I wonder how that would come out when shooting a portrait you plan to turn B&W later?
Should work fine, as long as you leave “auto color correction” and “auto mix” for the black-and-white conversion off in Lightroom. You can do a similar thing by just taking a normal portrait taken with a 5500K (~ sunlight) light source and then applying a red or orange filter to it digitally or, better yet, just play with the orange and red grayscale slider. It’s not exactly the same thing, but can produce similar types of results.
Also, the B&Ws out of something like Lightroom are fine, but the Silver Efex Pro 2 in the Nik Collection (which includes a mess of post processing software now for only $149 through Google. Before they got bought out it was something like $500+ for the suite) produces far superior black and white, in my opinion, and includes profiles of many black and white films, taking into account things like spectral sensitivity, grain, and even the looks of films pushed vs shot straight. It’s pretty darned cool. I do my quick & dirty black and whites in Lightroom, but when I really want to work on a monochrome image, these days it will eventually touch Silver Efex Pro 2.
I am not a camera expert, but the photos taken with a $40 click and shoot that is about 13MP are far better quality than what I get with a 5MP cameraphone. I’m sure there are a lot of other factors other than MP in that quality difference though.
That has been exactly my experience. As an old slide film shooter, I learned to expose mostly for the highlights to keep them from blowing out too much, and I just continued that when I took up digital. But I like the texture and full tonal gradation in Bob Ducca’s shots, something I haven’t been able to achieve with JPEGs. They remind me of medium format prints compared to 35mm prints in the film days.
Yep, you got the idea with JPEGs. Expose for highlights, bring the shadows up if needed. You might also want to use a JPEG setting that is fairly flat (i.e. low contrast, conservative), and then bring up contrast and saturation in post. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for JPEG, but you can accomplish quite a lot with it, and most of Bob Ducca’s shots are possible in JPEG.
Note that, all other things being equal, and assuming optics are good enough to justify it:
To get twice the resolution, you need four times the number of pixels.
My rule of thumb is you need about 50% more pixels to see a notable difference in quality. So, you quickly reach a point of diminishing returns. It’s a bit like audio, where you need 10 times the power to be twice as loud, and an amp has to have 50% more power to be barely noticeably louder.