Self Portrait

This will be a bit of a geeky post today.    I was playing around with my flashes late last night and thought, “I wonder if I can do a high key background without white seamless.”  So I grabbed my torture devices triggers, flashes, light stands, tripod and camera.   After salvaging two of my four AA rechargeable flash batteries for one of the flashes, which my oldest had abducted for a remote control digger, I was moving.   I was going for proof of concept here, didn’t really care much about the quality of the shot.  I had to shoot this all on manual focus, without a test subject to focus on, and with a wide aperture so the photos are somewhat out of focus.  In any case here was a before shot of what I was trying to blow away (this is with one flash 580 EXII 1/16 power camera right, high).

And here is what the final result looked like:

I will have to admit to a bit of photoshop on both of these.   The black fireplace opening, behind me, gave me some trouble.  It wasn’t bright but you could see it.   That is the only part the flash didn’t completely nuke.  I fixed it in aperture with the clone tool.  There are also some touch ups to my face — I am not going to post an image of myself, which I can control, without at least some minor improvements

The high key effect was produced was with a 580exII under a shoot through umbrella camera right and high gelled with CTO at 1/32 power (now that i look at it the CTO was a bit aggressive, if I were doing it again I would probably drop it down to 1/2 cto to lower the orange tint).   There was a Vivitar 285hv bare behind, aiming at the background at full power.   I had to drop the aperture to 2.8 in order to get the Vivitar to blow out the background.  Aside from what I mentioned above, it did a great job.

I know this photo is not a masterpiece, by any shape of the imagination, it was never intended to be.  I used it to teach myself a bit more about using off camera flash for effect.   In another post I will complain about the chineese torture devices known as Cactus V2S triggers, which were responsible for me staying up until 4am to get this thing finished, and show off my new alienbees when they arrive.