Like a lot of photographers I am much more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. But the theme of a recent photo club competition was self portraits. So I had to come up with something. I only had one photo of myself that I had taken that I thought was interesting enough. This is one I showed in another blog post. I just cropped it to emphasize the people.

Low Key Monochrome

I wanted to try to take a low-key shot with side or back lighting. But I still don’t have an external flash. I wanted a soft light source. None of our windows worked with good backgrounds or the right time of day. I was in my home office one day and turned off the light and noticed the light from my computer monitor. That could work! I realized after I took all of these photos that I wasn’t the first person to think of this. I found this later. But I was pretty proud of myself anyway.

I needed to turn off the other lights and turn up the ISO. For post processing, I used the FujiFilm Classic Chrome profile in Lightroom which made just about everything left in the background go black.

I tried several different angles. This one received third place in the novice monochrome category of our club contest.

I kind of like this one too but it was a similar angle to one below so I didn’t use it for the contest.

Silhouette

I wanted to do a silhouette so I wouldn’t be as recognizable in the competition. As I mentioned, no flash or white background. I read something about using a softbox app for the iPad to make interesting photos. That could be my background at least for my face. So I stood up the iPad on my desk. I sat in front of it. Focusing was even more difficult. I only got 3 shots out of about 20 that were in focus. I was pretty happy with these two that I got.

Conclusion

I’m glad this competition got me to try a couple new techniques. I’m not sure if I’ll take any more self portraits but it’s something I can use when shooting others or still lifes.