Favorites Part Four

This one is a little personal. Of course, it is only because it is a picture of myself. There is a bi-weekly photo contest on a web forum that I frequent, and the theme for the week was "Self-Portrait."

Up to this point I had pretty much zero experience taking pictures of people, and absolutely no experience with manipulating light. I think I was at work when I got the idea for the picture, I had the idea for a picture that says "This guy just got off a hard day of work. He is relaxing and getting drunk."

So I figure out which room of my house I wanted to use (the computer room) and started figuring out the shot. I tried a few test shots where the only light was coming from my computer monitor, and I tried it out using a few different colors, blue, red, and green. Of course the problem with that was I could not sit still long enough for the 5 second minimum exposure necessary to get enough light to see me. And even then it was a pretty boring photo.

So I improvised a bit, and found this lantern flashlight and put it off-camera right on the ground. I then took a regular flashlight and placed it on the computer desk and aimed it at my face. I had read an article on the strobist blog earlier that day about how shadows add interest to a photo so I put a crumpled-up duffle bag near the lantern on the floor.

I took the photo with a 1 second exposure at 1600 iso, so I didn't have to hold the pose too long. The photo was pretty noisy so I used this program called Noise Ninja to remove most of the noise, but doing so gave the photo a real soft, almost hdr look. Later in lightroom I slightly increased the contrast and clarity.

I still don't own any nice flashes, so whenever I need external lighting I once again use a ghetto setup of flashlights. I will probably be picking up some sort of flash system this December to hopefully increase my ability to take fun photos like these.