Ok. Ok. Why did I have a personal photoshoot with myself in dramatic dark lighting? Let me explain. The reason is quite simply that it was an assignment for a film class. (I take classes with Filmgate here in Miami.) The point was to practice single-source lighting and create shadows on a face. I used my own face. It’s the only one I have around the house.
Personally, I think it’s funny and I’m kind of proud of the way the photos came out. I tried to practice as if I was directing a model. Where to look, how to pose, what emotion to express at the camera. It was an exercise on directing myself too.
There certainly were challenges. For light, I used a household lamp that kind of looks like a white light saber. This made for a pretty sweet line of catch-light in my eye. Getting the light I wanted took a lot of trial and error. Between fIguring out the right aperture, shutter speed (1/25 and f3.5 at 18mm) to use on the camera and trying to setup the background, I probably took about 200 shots and spent about two hours figuring it out. Plus finding the right spot in my white-walled apartment and where the light wasn’t bouncing around too much took a lot of patience.
I needed a little post work on these so I had to refresh my Lightroom skills to fix and brush up some of the background shadows. A black background or wall would have been ideal, but I used the the black side of my round reflector kit as my background and that left some noticeable objects and white in the back. I’m glad I went through the work of this, doing it with a real model would be even better and makes me daydream a bit about having my own photo studio. Yeah baby!
Overall the key takeaways for me were coming to understand how a light source bounces around the room, creates shadows and what types of emotions each angle can give off about the subject to the viewer. Fact is, this just isn’t stuff you understand until you actually get behind the camera and light and do it. Plus it’s never a bad time to Vogue.