These are all pictures that I shot at a photo club picnic in an effort to imitate Avedon's style used for his series "In the American West"

He would typically tape white background paper to the side of a building and photograph in full shade.

Instead of asking his models to smile he would ask them to relax their face .  He felt that this was the only way to get a true picture of what they were really like.

These are all rough low resolution scans from 8x10 black and white contact prints.  The film used was 100 ASA Tmax and therefore the exposures were in the 1/2 second to one second range at between F22 to F 32.