Now tell me…did you all groan from the very poor pun in the title? I hope so. First let me tell you the reason behind this image. I had another image of myself for my About page, but I felt that it was a very “aggressive” and kind of scary or intimidating shot of myself. The background was deep red, my shirt was bright red, I was looking slightly down at the camera, and I was very close to the camera, only showing half my face. We were having a bonfire the other night, and ended up having a very nice sunset to shoot against, so I decided I would try to get a new shot for the website.
Thought Process
This time I decided to back up a bit and get a waist up shot. So it was a pretty easy choice to grab my 28mm lens. I wanted to get myself, but I also wanted to include plenty of my surroundings. The time of this shot is about 8pm – there was still plenty of light and I knew I wanted to tone the background down a bit, so I knew I would need a flash in order to control the light on 2 different levels. I grabbed my DIY Beauty dish – which is pretty much my go-to light modifier these days. It softens the light up a bit, but it’s still very controlled, very directional, and creates very nice shadow areas, which I love. Like I said before, I like the look of directional light, so I only grabbed on light. It might have been nice to maybe have a bit of a reflector on the camera right side of me, just to fill in the shadows, but I was alone at the time and I don’t own a reflector stand so that pretty much nixed that idea.
Camera Settings
I think I ended up underexposing the sky by about 1 to 1.5 stops, in order to get a deeper color. The flash was camera left, about 3 feet away and a few inches above me, set at 1/4 power. Since I’m using a slightly wide-angle lens, I needed to lean in to the camera just a bit in order to compensate for a bit of distortion that made my arm closest to the camera look huge. Which I suppose could have been a flattering effect in some sense, it wasn’t really what I was going for. More “regular ol’ me”, less “Quasimodo”.
Post-Processing
In Photoshop Elements (Photoshop does way more than I need – I’m settling for Elements until I’m shooting magazine covers regularly. Elements is a GREAT program and it’s only like $70), I added touched up my face and shirt a bit, then added a layer of High Pass Filter and changed the layer blending mode to “Soft Light”, which sharpened the image a bit and gave the light a bit more punch. I also added another layer and changed the blending mode to “Overlay” then dropped the opacity down to about 25% to 50% to bump up the contrast a bit.
When all was said and down, I have to say, I really like this image. I’m looking forward to shooting some more mixed light portraits this season.
Got any questions? Drop a comment and I’ll answer it as best as I can!
First off, I can’t really take credit for the pun, which is why it’s so bad, but I can take credit for having the wit to use it, I suppose. Thanks for the feedback – I’ll try to make this a continuous thing, posting images and breaking them down like that.
First of all, I LOVED the pun in the title. Shocking, I know.
I like this photo a lot, and I agree that it’s a much more “welcoming” photo then the angry red one. The red one is awesome too, but not as a calling card. And I really enjoyed how you broke down this post. Thought processes are the best!
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