I guess I should talk about the portrait. I'm doing this b/w challenge thing, 5 days 5 photos, and today is day 2. I decided that I wanted to do a dramatic portrait, which meant doing some dramatic lighting.
First, I started with a small soft box on one side. It was really close to me, and almost on axis with me. That means it was side lighting me and barely front lighting at all. This provides the most contrast between the highlights and shadows on the face, and gives the most dramatic lighting.
Then I decided that I wanted to have a light on the other side too, but have it be sharper and even more dramatic. So I put a bare strobe in a grid there, and put it a little behind me. Super, super contrasty lighting. With the grid, you get all the hard light a bare strobe does, but the light fall off is just beautiful. Just absolutely beautiful.
With these lights set up, I was set.
But something was missing. Just me was well, boring. I'm not the most interesting subject in the world, so I needed something else...hmmmm....why don't I go dump some water on my head! Yeah!
So that's what I did. I shot at f11 to capture as much detail as I could, so every little drop would be razor sharp. With the contrast and clarity most of the way up in editing, it helps even more. This is probably one of the sharpest portraits I've taken.
Other than contrast and clarity, I did one other little edit. On my shoulder and neck, I darkened things up and raised the contrast/clarity even more. I felt like that area was a little distracting, and needed to go away. I also blurred it a little bit, so it's still there and adding to the photo, but it's darker, more blurry, and doesn't draw attention to it's self. Sometimes, to make things become less obvious, you have to make them more contrasty and dramatic. Usually it's the other way around, but with portraits like this, the other way worked!
See you tomorrow!
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