Trial-and-Error: Self-Portraiture

In the age of 8 MP phone cameras and Instagram, taking a picture of your own face seems a little simplistic. You flip your phone around (or use your dinky, after-thought front camera), add a pretty filter, and upload.

But why stop there? Let's take it a step further by unnecessarily spending 30 minutes dealing with the frustration of aiming a tripod-mounted camera and two manual flashes!

I decided to try taking my own portrait because my girlfriend was tired of having a shaky 6 inch cylinder aimed at her head (hey-yo!) and her dog refuses to sit still on her living room furniture.

What a stud!

I originally wanted to take a low key portrait of myself, so I stopped down to near-pitch-black so that any ambient light wouldn't pour through. I wanted this particular shoot to be all about the strobes. I used my trusty (cheap) Canon 1100D with an EF 85mm f/1.8. I'm a little iffy on the max sync speed of my strobe setup, so I set it to 1/200. I stopped my aperture down to f/5.6 to keep the picture black and sharpness peaked. My priority is keeping my ISO at 100, and I adjusted everything else to accommodate it.

Prints not for sale.

With ambient light cut out of the formula, it's not time to set up the first strobe! To get the positioning right, I simply set up a Yongnuo YN-460 unmodified at 1/16 power to get some Rembrandt going on.

The less detail you can make up, the handsomer I am.

Because the light was set up literally a foot and a half away from my face with no modifier, the cast is harsh and makes me look like I'm escaping from prison. My eye sure looks pretty though!

Despite the ugliness of the current photo, I've gotten the Rembrandt I wanted and I like the substantial catch light in my eye. I realize I'll need to readjust slightly to get the catchlight in the other eye as well, but this is close enough. My next task was to soften and widen the light to even out the spill across the right side of my face.

I also wanted to soften the shadows on my left side a little, but I would have to bring the strobe across farther and compromise my positioning. Sure, it's easy to try, but setting your camera's timer and running back into position makes my patience glands cringe. As you can see, the area that the light is falling on is a bit wider, and a lot of that glaring whiteness has faded considerably.

Next, I wanted to get the light just right on my face. I could either stop down my Speedlite, or adjust my camera's settings; Because I have a lot more room for fine adjustments on my SLR (1/3 stops on the camera vs completely halving my strobe light), I stepped back and dialed the light intake down a bit.

And this is a rather accurate representation of my skin tone, so I went with this. There are a couple of harsh highlights on my face, but this could be reverted later by stepping backwards a bit. One disappointing outcome of this, however, is that the catchlight had disappeared! This was probably because of my body's position.

And here's the result of simple stepping backwards a little. The catchlight has returned and the highlights have simmered down. With a little bit darker background, I could simply wave this off as a low key photo, but why not brighten things up a bit more for a little more shebang?

I added another YN-460II into the mix to act as a fill light, just to brighten up the shadows a little bit so people would know that I, in fact, am not missing half of my face. The key YN-460II at 1/16th in a small softbox was already a pretty powerful force as it was so close to my face. I set up the 2nd strobe a little bit farther, pointing about 45 degrees upwards (opposite the key light) at 1/64th power, which is the absolute weakest setting for the model.

And here is the final result. This took a while to do, but it's a little less simple when you're running back and forth between your position and the camera. I say this is pretty good, but I do have a little bit of self-criticism (the origin of my insecurity problems).

• There is a noticeably shadow to the left, caused by the unsoftened fill light. Given the room to use bigger softboxes or umbrellas, I would do so to get rid of that.
• The catchlights worked out quite well, and I ended up getting highlights on my eyes from both strobes. However, the key light didn't quite make completely to my left eye. I had to edit it to be a bit brighter, which was actually the only post that I really did.
• This is the primary criticism: There are ugly shadows cast by my nose and collar caused by the unmodified fill light, which is the biggest problem. The light should've been modified by a softbox/umbrella like the key and pulled around more towards the front.
• My hair is ugly and I didn't shave.

With a little more time and consideration, I could've pulled off a really great portrait! I'll have to settle with this, which is still what I would consider pretty decent.