Archive for December, 2007

Brian Auer of Epic Edits blog announced a community photo project named: Shoot Yourself.

Since I was planning to make a self portrait anyway I took the opportunity and some holiday time from the family to make these below:

HDR

original

LucisArt

I never thought that making self portrait is such a challenge. This set is actually the result of the second self session. The first one simply did not give any reasonable pictures. I know that even this one is far from perfect, but my model was so impatient and sad, I was not able to cheer him up with my usual ice breaking jokes.

This is how I made the pictures:
I used a mirror, my Nikon D80 with the 70-200 F2.8 VR lens and two SB-800 speedlights. One of the SB-800s to my left side as key light fired into a reflecting umbrella in TTL mode compensated with +2/3 and the other as a rim or hair light to my right in manual mode at about 1/32 power both controlled by the commander mode of the built in flash of the camera. (The built in flash fired only to sync the remote ones.)

I was shooting in raw mode and processed the pictures in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: cropped the image and adjusted the white balance, fill light and saturation a bit. I used the outcome of the processing for the ‘original‘ and the ‘LucisArt‘ pictures, where – in case of the latter – I used the LucisArt filter in Photoshop. The ‘HDR‘ one was made from one single raw file using Photomatix for tone mapping.

Oh, and of course I flipped the picture horizontally to place the shutter button to the right side – remember I was using a mirror.

This story started when I showed my earlier slide shows to a colleague of mine. When he mentioned my photography enthusiasm to his wife, Annamari, who is happen to be a hobbyist belly dancer, she turned out to be interested in making a few pictures of herself and her instructor, Judit. The deal was this: I can practice portrait photography on them and they might have a few good photographs of themselves for promotional purposes. Anita, my make up expert , was luckily available for the occasion too. With her the deal is that she is working on extending her portfolio.
So we started to organize the shooting. Judit found a nice place in the fancy old Buda Castle area (Budapest, Hungary). I purchased a brolly and a tripod for the flash and did my part of planning too: I checked pictures of belly dancers on the Web for ideas and inspiration, read an article on posing, thought a lot about lighting options, spent some time on finding free belly dance music for my future slide show.

Still not being a professional photographer I have the courage to share my mistakes and learnings of a shooting session not destroying my reputation at all .

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No shutter release button has been pressed for some time now, but I keep reading on photography.
These are the blogs that I read regularly:

Strobist: an amazing blog by David Hobby on off camera (remote) flash lighting techniques. His slogan is: Less gear – More brain – Better light.
photographyvoter.com: a Digg like submit-read-vote kind of community news portal on photography in general.
Rasmus Rasmussen: a Danish guy living and photographing in Seattle is writing on photography. Great blog, but sometimes he just can not find the time to write due to his real-money-assignments.
Beyond the Obvious: a blog by Paul Indigo.
Photohacker: blog for the digital photography geeks.
Chase Jarvis blog: a blog by – guess – Chase Jarvis, professional commercial photographer specialised in lifestyle photography. Many photographer would like to be Chase Jarvis when they grow up.
Photopreneur: a blog on the business side of photography.
Microstock Diaries: blog by Lee Torrens on selling photos on microstock sites with real experience and selling statistics.
Epic Edits: Brian Auer’s blog focusing on taking and post-processing pictures. This list of readings is not even comparable to his one.
The F Stop Magazine: astonishing pictures and in-depth explanations of how they were made.
Inside Lightroom: articles on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom from various authors.

I came across a post by Chase Jarvis on how he packs his photography gears.
Chase is a professional commercial photographer specialized in life style and sport photography. His gear is simply huge and it requires quite some skills and practice to pack them all. However, I think any photographer – being though an amateur or hobby photographer – might benefit from his video. Thanks Chase for sharing it.

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