So, I got this complaint from my old friend Leon, who said the self-portrait I was using for my profile for this blog was "terrifying and depressing." He said he had known me since we were in Junior High School, and he'd never seen me frown. He ordered me to ditch that picture immediately.Well, who am I to disappoint an old friend? So, I set up this new shot by staring directly into my Canon 580 EX II Speedlite flash with a Lumiquest LQ-119 Softbox III velcroed to the front of it.
I shot everything in manual mode, including the flash. In this case I triggered the camera with an electronic shutter release cable in my right hand. The flash was synched with a simple PC cord.
First, I set the camera sensor at ISO 100 (to minimize sensor noise) and the shutter speed at 1/250 second (the fastest available synch speed for flash on my Canon 40D camera). Next I stopped the aperture down to about f/5.6 to give me a moderate depth of field and to underexpose the ambient light on the background by maybe 3 stops. I wanted it dark. Then I set my flash manually by trial and error (flash meters are for sissies!), until my face was properly exposed. I just kept readjusting the manual flash intensity and checking the histogram on the back of my camera, until it looked about right. If you want to learn more about how to do this, check out Strobist.com.
After some minor touhch-ups in Photoshop CS4 (mostly because I needed a shave), I layered on one of the seriously cool frames available in OnOne PhotoFrame Professional (third party plug-in software that works with Photoshop CS4). In this case I was doing my photographer thing, so I picked a frame that made the image look like a strip of 35 mm film.
I posted this image on my Flickr site and got 36 viewings in the first two minutes. Interesting. Must be the frame.
-CG TTL
PS: In case you're interested, here's a link to that terrifying and depressing shot!
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