A boring Friday night, taking a self-portrait

vilva · Expire: 2015-05-27

Last Friday night I was tired, bored and had nothing better to do so I decided to play with the 4.5/105 Heliar on 5D and try to take a decent self-portrait. The room was dimly lit with a single 23W mini fluorescent bulb inside a 60 cm diameter Chinese paper lampshade, very low contrast lighting. I have got only a 50 cm remote release for the 5D, which severely restricts the maximum shooting distance, making framing with a 105mm lens quite critical. The DOF at f/4.5 and less than 2 m is also rather shallow, which makes blind focusing very difficult.

I mounted the camera on a tripod, focused at the pattern of the cloth covering the chair, tried to estimate where my face would be when sitting on the chair, which would flex something like 5cm, and moved the tripod backwards correspondingly. The first two shots were for adjusting the height of the tripod and exposure bracketing for a suitable underexposure, which would allow full control of skin highlights during PP, the first shot was at ISO800 and 1/15s, the second one at 1/10s. The next two shots were for framing and focusing - I took a shot, checked the result, sat again down and tried to remember how I had been sitting and what corrections were necessary. The fifth shot is the final one with everything down pat. Here you see the five shot series, unprocessed and uncropped:

The small, unprocessed version doesn't look so great, but after five minutes with LightZone I was quite pleased with the result. I pushed the exposure about 1.25 stops but made no contrast adjustments. The spectral composition of the lighting was such that I immediately gave up all attempts of finding a decent white balance and converted the image to B&W trying to find a natural tonal balance corresponding to the external circumstances and what I see in a mirror. The final image is available at

http://galactinus.net/vilva/retro/eos5d_heliar_files/he10303_bw4_s.jpg

The focus is OK given the shallow DOF of about +/- 3 cm, the bokeh is also OK. Note that my right arm is rather stretched forward in order to reach the remote release, which makes me look as if engaged in some activity, counterbalancing my rather stern facial expression - the usual me, OTOH.

Veijo

Rob Leslie · Joined: 20 Mar 2007 Posts: 1103 Location: UK Swindon

A good illustration of something to do when you’re bored on a Friday night!
Interesting lighting idea which shows anybody can have a go at doing a ‘Decent portrait’ If you have a 5D!
Nice one.