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.