Self Portrait - Alternative To Pouring Rain Weather.

Weather decided to stay stable i.e. wet, and grey and on top of it rained like hell today. I had this desire to shoot something indoor. In the end I chose myself - let's do low key self-portrait. Perhaps I can start model career on top of JBModel.eu :-) Or perhaps not, I am shooting and not modelling in terms of being a model.

I used one strobe with softbox as key light, reflector, and second strobe to highlight my hair to get some separation. Very simple setup.

580EX II flash at full power in manual mode, actually everything in full manual mode, second flash at 1/4 of power. Camera on tripod with 70-200mm lens with focal length set to around 150mm. Camera pre-focused and set to 1/160s, ISO 200, f/16. Such settings completely kill any ambient light, and everything around falls into complete darkness. In fact I shot myself with lights on and they not visible at all. So closed aperture - f/16 - also gives me relatively large depth of field which is helpful when shooting yourself and you can always position yourself few centimetres further or closer to pre-defined distance. As a backdrop I used piece of black paper.

Softbox is placed exactly to camera left of the model (me), on the other side I mounted round white reflector to give me fill light coming from the key light. To get some separation and to highlight my messy evening hair I placed second strobe above me pointing almost exactly towards my head but also slightly swivelled towards reflector, so some light would bounce back onto my face. 

Getting correct manual focus

Note, that I am wearing glasses, my eyes are not as good as they used to be... I need them to read. I put them for the portrait on purpose.

Glasses are built of glass, and glass reflects light. You have to take care of lights' angles and their reflections in order to see through the glass and see eyes properly. This is one of the reason I put lights on both my sides and above and not in front. If I had an assistant... I might have played more, but I was on my own thus went for safest option, and you can see my eyes normally.

To trigger everything the whole lot I used radio poppers, which also fired the camera remotely. 

First things first -  find your correct exposure. As mentioned I wanted to kill fully ambient light so I had to play around 1/200s - 1/160s shutter speed - 1/200s is typical synch speed of most of the cameras. Key strobe set to full power but soft box takes quite some light so in fact real output is way weaker. 

With little experience you will know where to start and what to tweak, I typically start with 1/4 of power and f/8 and keep on adjusting to my needs. 

Key Light is on

My goal was f/16 (larger depth of field) so I went to maximum with the strobe and with ISO 200.

Next step, I placed paper tubes on top of each other in the spot where I would be standing and set correct focus. Only one light is on and it gives me the idea of key light. 

With focus set and locked, I appear on the stage...

Working with roughly 200mm focal length I can really frame myself with complete separation from the surrounding. In fact the picture was taken with 173mm (as EXIF data say...) and camera distance was only about 2 metres away from me.

Still only key light is on, and not reflector in place. I am checking for reflections in my glasses and all is fine. 

Later on I realized I missed the focus wee bit and had to re-adjust and re-shoot. To be 100% true, I did not miss the focus... I stood to close to the camera. I forgot where I placed paper tube in the fist place! Mark it somehow to save yourself time. This picture does not show it, but full magnification would reveal focus problem. Even those 5-10 centimetres mattered, especially with large focal length and very short distance to subject. 

Key light, with reflector and separation light

With 200mm lens and distance to subject of less than 2 metres, you get only 8 cm of depth of field!

It is trial and error exercise, if you are alone. But at this stage I was more concerned about key light and correct exposure... well correct for my needs. I want to emphasize here that it was shot in normal tungsten light lit room, and this cannot be seen at all.

Now it is time to switch on separation light and put on reflector to highlight my face from the other side. I did not want to stay for too long on the dark side of the force...

What a difference!

Camera settings have not changed. Simply more light. 

You can see my whole face, light is soft and I also stick out from black background, not like being completely lost in the dark. Fill light is coming only from reflector, nice soft and darker light. 

Should I had more space and moved the backdrop further away, it would be pitch black. Picture is not post processed, pure as it came from the camera, and could be still adjusted to taste. But I wanted to keep it simple.

Checking focus on eyes

Finally... I thought it was final, but then at closer look I realized my eyes were not dead sharp. I had to re-shoot myself. I placed the paper tubes again taking marks on the floor where the focus is relocked focus to new position. 

This time result was much better. 

Eyes must be the key focus point and must be sharp!

Even if you shoot yourself, I mean you physically shoot, you must not use centre focus point and recompose with such long focal length.

While recomposing you change distance to subject and you might miss even focal length. I was shooting at f16 and had only 8cm but if you shoot with f/2.8 for instance, your depth of field is only 1.5 cm!

So triple check, eyes are dead sharp. Wear glasses, like in my case to see it properly.

The portrait is not perfect, I could do so much more with different background, different colours and so many other things. But it was fun to shoot simple self portrait in your room, workshop at the same time. And I should add it is quite small place.

The point is that even in such small location you can have some fun photo shooting when weather really does not play the game.

Simple setup, few beers, 2 strobes, reflector... 

and a pipe!

this picture is out of focus, but I still like it. It will never be printed in large format. Good enough for web.

Cheers

Jerzy