Another high-key self portrait. What can ya do? At least I’m getting away from the usual awkward glare that normally haunts my self portraits. I really like the way this one turned out though – it’s fairly different from my usual stuff.
I initially got the idea for this shot about a month ago when I came across the August 14, 2009 issue of Entertainment Weekly in my office break room. The cover was for District 9 (great movie, BTW) and I really liked the composition of the shot. Here is a quick look at it:
Something about the composition really pulled me in.
Now, I lit this one completely differently. Mostly because I just had the composition in my head and didn’t have the magazine in front of me. I was over at Eliesha’s along with Jason waiting for a couple of models to show up to do a fashion/lingerie shoot – long story short, they never showed up. Rather than waste the setup we convinced Eliehsa to model for us (post about that later), and while she was getting ready I hopped in and grabbed this shot of myself.
We used the same setup the whole night: white seamless paper, two Alienbees (B400 and B800) at 1/4 power as background lights (to get pure white) – these lights where flagged with some black seamless paper scraps, and a Photogenic StudioMax III in a 22″ beauty dish as the main light. I really liked this lighting setup – it worked pretty well for all of the shots we did that night, including this one of me. Here is the setup shot:
As far as post-processing goes I used my usual routine that has been seen on most of my self portraits. It’s a look I like and it’s getting pretty easy for me to do in Photoshop. It’s a much different look from the Entertainment Weekly cover, but it works for me none-the-less. I ALMOST gave myself the alien eye, almost, but decided against it. Maybe I’ll go back and try that some day.
I’ve already got next week’s shot in mind, so hopefully I can get it knocked out early and have most of the week to edit it. It will be a fairly intensive Photoshop process, so the extra time would be good. It’ll be an experiment with having a specific final product in mind that will require Photoshop to get the end result, so I’ll need to light, compose, and execute the initial shot with that in mind.
I also have a couple of other shoots I’m finishing up the editing on that should have their own blog posts coming soon. So watch for those!