Unplug Me

This shot was a taken during a phase where I wanted to create thematic images.  This is obviously a composite of two shots, 1) my face under a couch, 2) the wire.

For the first shot, I placed the camera on the floor under the couch on the 10 second timer, and ran and posed for the shot.  It would be given that this took a few tries.   I used the ebay triggers to fire my 420ex shot into a reflector that was right above my head.  I taped a white piece of paper infront of the couch to have more fill light on my face.  One can pull off this shot without a ebay trigger as they can leave the room dark, and having a longer exposure.  Then have a friend, or your other arm trigger the flash.

The wire shot was posed with a piece of tape that you can still see on the start of the loop.  I used a the flash on the camera left to triggered by ebay wizzards (or you can use a long exposure), and a reflector on the camera right.  This makes the wire pop out a little more.

Since the room was black, it was easy to crop out the wire and photoshop this on the first shot.  I also created a solid black horizontal line on the top of my face as the original couch image had a soft line similar to the bottom of the image.

Lessons learned:

• The key lesson here is putting in the hard work.  I cannot emphasize enough how much work it is to become a good photographer, and I cannot say myself that I am anywhere close to professional grade, but hard work and plenty of hours spent planning, capturing and photoshoping is the only way to become a good photographer.  Skills and creativity only expedites the process.
• Another lesson is the use of flash and reflectors to highlight images.  I’ve started to enjoy photographing in rooms where all the lights are off.

Stuck in Technology

This was a photo I created while during a phase where I enjoyed creating thematic editorial style images.  I wanted to show how my life was very dependent on technology where I find myself consistently checking my phone every free minute of the day; while waiting for coffee to sitting on the throne.

At this point, being really new at lighting, I really didn’t know what to expect from this shot, so it was mainly trial and error.  This image was a composite of two images.  The first was myself holding the phone, and the second was the image of me pressed against the glass.

For the first image, I used one bare flash on camera right behind me, triggered by ebay wizards (during the short period they were working) that acted as a hair light.  I held a white piece of reflector that I held with my right hand on the camera left which was the fill light for the front of my face.  Needless to say, the room was pitch black.

The second image was a flash shot into an 30usd umbrella on camera left infront of the glass which acted as the main light.  This was very tricky to get the angle right as you don’t want to to shoot where you get the reflection from the umbrella.  So I shot perpendicular to the glass, and put the umbrella about 45degrees to camera left.  The second set of light was an 420ex triggered by ebay wizards that filled the background behind me.

Post processing was simple select and paste into the main larger image.  I did some minor touching up for the major blemishes, but overall did a sharpening to have the real human effect.  The biggest challenge was to play with the levels on both images to balance the images ensuring enough attention was drawn to the second image.

Lessons Learned:

• Posing, being the self model, it was really difficult to hold the pose and frame yourself within the camera as well.  Snapping the picture, guessing where the frame is, and holding an interesting pose was more difficult than I anticipated.  Further, if you look in detail, you can see my eyes are not looking at the phone, but instead infront of it to ensure both eyes are in the frame.  My hands were uncomfortably close to my face, but hey, that’s photography for you.  Go ask any models if their poses are comfortable, and not those models on Heuf Heffner’s couch.
• This was a very lighting oriented exercise, so I have to include that lighting was a very good lessons learned process.

Result of a flu

This image was another thematic images where my head was exploding and eyes turned fiery red.  So I decided to portray this in photography and this was the result.  I knew that I needed light coming from above to create the heavy light coming from the top showing off my heavy eye bags.  I love the grose texture found on my face to give it that grungy look… now upon further contemplation, I could have taken this with hard light bare flash coming from the bottom… but let’s ignore that.

I simply used a bare flash and shot it into an umbrella creating a softer shadow (similar to a beauty dish).  This was done holding my camera infront of my face and snapping the image.

Most of the work here was done using Lightroom and Photoshop.  I de-saturated the image except for my eyes.  I changed the white balance for just my eyes to turn it a little more blue to complement the orange flames.  I found a flame image on google and photoshopped it in my eyes.  This was pretty straight forward.

Lessons Learned:

• I would definately have to say that learning to manually control the tones in black and white would be the hardest thing.  One can see the color highlights (lack of control) found on my cheek and eyebrows.  Now this is very easily solved with lightroom presets.