Yesterday, browsing Pinterest, I stumbled upon (sic!) a great photo, that led me to a great photography tutorial site, phototuts+. After reading the article on awesome selfies, I moved on and read a couple of more. Since I love myself, like any true exhibitionist and am totally fascinated by the various ways light can transform a human face, no wonder that this article spurred me into action.
How to Shoot a Professional, Creative Low-Key Self Portrait. It all seemed so easy. I truly believed I could do it. Hah!
"Set your camera to black-and-white-mode." Seriously, you just don't want to know how long I looked for that aspect on my Samsung PL210 digital camera. I found it. Only to discover that it was not an option with the rest of my settings. So I had to apply a black-and-white effect on my photos in the photo editing programme. (I used picmonkey. I love it.) And it turned out that most of my photos sucked in black-and-white-mode. Haha!
Though, I managed to create one photo that came out fantastically dramatic in black-and-white.
"Illuminate the subject and allow the background to remain unlit and black." Nope! That didn't work out for me either.
"Keep ISO at the lowest level! Hurray! At last! Some success!
"Set the camera to 'Manual' mode, all the settings must be under control." Again, haha!
"Tripod." I have no tripod, I used an old cupboard door and books.
"Reading lamp." Well, when I screwed in the Osram bulb I should have known I was in for some trouble.
"A dark room." It was pitch black. Yet, I managed to light it up like a Christmas tree with a single bulb.
"Self-timer and burst-mode". Well, my camera does not allow the two together. So I went for the self-timer.
I set up everything like you can see in the original article. Then I switched the place of the lamp and the camera.
Here are some of my favourite photos.
This is the original background. I didn't apply any effects here. Though you can't see much of me in this photo, it says a lot about me.
This one is actually my mother's favourite. You can see that I'm not afraid of harsh lights and I absolutely love my nose.
The effect here is called 'tranquile' and I've never heard of it before, but it seemed to work well for this photo.
The experience was both exhausting and exhilarating. I'm sure to repeat it. Hopefully with better results.
Do you shoot self-portraits? Black and white or colour? Do you try out things you read in tutorials or you just go after your own head? Let me know in the Comments below. (Mind you, I set all comments to moderate, so it may take a while to appear.)
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