Week 20

Week 20 and I took zero pictures until tonight. My penance is (the only thing I could think of) self portraits. I'm like most people and hate pictures of myself. I dragged the mono block lights out to the back yard and tried out a few things. The camera was set up on a tripod with a timer.

 

Picture #1 - One light camera right and one camera left with orange gels in front of lights.  One light behind me camera left.  The orange gels allowed me to adjust the white balance after shooting to make my skin look normal and the sky bright blue.

Picture #2 - Same gels and lights as Picture #1.

Picture #3 - This is one of the shots that the flashes did not fire on.  The white balance has not been adjusted and you can see the background, but no detail on the subject. 

Picture #4 - I took the orange gels off of the lights and moved them around some.  I now had one octabox softbox above the camera to the right.  I also had two lights with reflectors one behind the subject on the right, the other behind the subject on the left.  The processing effect that I was trying to achieve is called Dragan.  It was used a lot in the Twilight movie posters.

Picture #5 - You aren't supposed to shoot portraits from below (up people's noses).  Doesn't seem to much of an issue here though since the bottom of the nose is in shadow.

Picture #6 - Wow that's a big forehead.  I think the flash reflected off of it and caused a bit of lens flare.

Picture #7 - The clouds look ominous but they are the same as in picture #1 and #2.  Their exposure is dropped another stop to darken them up some and no white balance correction.

If anyone wants to volunteer to model for some pictures, let me know.  It will be doing everyone a favor so that we won't have to look at more pictures of me next week.