I’ve decided to use this picture of myself on my “About Me” section of my photography website, as the one I was previously going to use just didn’t portray me as a photographer, and I had a lot of fun making this one. Anyone who knows me well knows that I most enjoy using small off camera flashes to take portraits. I am a Strobist, which is what many in the industry have dubbed photographers who utilize ambient light and light from “strobes” in conjunction with each other to achieve a look in a photograph that is many times not possible or just not easily done with ambient light alone. Please don’t get me wrong- I don’t think anything bad about a photographer who chooses to use natural light only. In fact, there are many photographers whose photographs I absolutely adore who work with existing light exclusively, and who could kick my butt in a competition. I get a lot of inspiration from Joe McNally (famed National Geographic photographer & a “strobist”) and just happen to personally prefer the creative control and the seemingly endless amount of looks that I can achieve with adding small flashes to the mix. Which is how I took this portrait of myself, a “selfie” with my main camera on a tripod and a remote infrared trigger in my right hand. If you’re a Photo Nerd like me or you’re just interested in how I did it, keep reading. At first glance, it looks like I’ve taken the picture after the sun has sunk below the horizon, but in reality it was actually taken about an hour or 45 minutes before sunset on what had been a bright sunny day. I was practicing a technique which has me manipulating the color temperature of the image manually in my camera and gelling my flashes to make my skin look a flattering color. So, if you look at the image again, you can tell that I messed with the color temperature of the exposure by looking at the shadows on my skin and the little patch of natural light hitting my hair on the right side of the picture (which one might have believed was a botched coloring of the background in Photoshop if I didn’t offer this explanation). Now if I had left the color temperature of the ambient light alone and set it to look like how our eyes would normally perceive it, but left the orange gel on my flash, I would look like a pumpkin or an Oompa Loompa. Even with the color temperature change, I may have used too saturated of a gel for my taste. And voila, magic! Not really, but sometimes I like to believe it is. I’ll keep pushing myself to make better magic for ya’all. (Oh, and if you’re getting tired of looking at my doofy face, I encourage you to refer someone to my services and I’ll happily clutter your newsfeed with theirs.) Thanks for reading!
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 19:34:19 +0000
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