I guess I'm bored and have way to much time on my hands, but my self portraits start to improve.

They are still not perfectly sharp and in focus, but they become usable.

All shots are done with a 3 light setup,

1 x SB-600 1/2 power on the left
1 x SB-600 1/2 power on the right
1 x SB-600 1/1 power on the front left slightly above me

35mm
1/500s most of them
F/10 to get them somehow sharp since I had to guess the correct focus point

conversion to B&W done during adobe lightroom and slightly enhancement of contrast,coloring of highlights and vignette

The complete collection can be found here


My nose in the second picture is sadly slightly over exposed (guess 1 stop or so) and could not save it in lightroom.

I really like the first one, to sad that only the nose is really sharp in focus. But I was not able to repeat this and started to get dizzy...

Originally uploaded by Salman Hamid

just a wonderful picture and I definably going to try to copy it some time.

possible setup:

1 x background light on a purple/pink background positioned slightly under her shoulder
1 x soft box or umbrella from right above, more likely a large softbox
F/20 and 1/125s with a 200mm lens (FX)

And I guess this was it.

just sitting here and try to blackout backgrounds with the use of a flash,

- simple just reduce distance to subject and increase the shutter speed

Now I want to have nice soft light and so I use a shot threw umbrella.

- does not work, you need to block the light partwise, since umbrellas spell the light in every possible direction. Does not work, since the background comes to a black grey in the best case

So I tried to gobo the umbrella, which basically did not work, there was a difference but not as much as I liked it.
Afterwards I tried a reflective umbrella, which can did provide the same result as before, so no help either.

Result?

a) use only hard light
b) get your hand on a softbox (easy) and a adapter to connect it to the falshes (nearly impossible)

well getting up at 4 am on a Saturday morning and trying to shoot pictures of birds starting at sunrise is way more challenging than I thought.

I took 200 pictures, run out of batteries once (the SB-900 uses way to much juice) and not one really nice picture. So were so so, but not worth it to be stored/posted.

-