Last Sunday I posted a self portrait on my g+ account and I just wanted to share the making here.
The Taking
I used a Elinchrome Quadra Ranger RX with two head. One head with the main power output (2/3) with an 8degree grid was positioned on my left with the narrow spot on the half without make-up. The other head with less power (1/3) was basically in front of my in a softbox. My Nikon D3 was on a gorilla pod on the table (my arca-swiss ball head is in service) right next to the softbox. A macro lens was on the cam to create a real lens blur and I tried to get my left eye in focus which turned out not to be totally easy. I tried different poses and angles until I finally got the image I liked. I was leaning forward looking in a thirty degree angle left of the camera, rotating my shoulder back and releasing the camera with a cable release. The make-up side had decent fill light to work with and the spot created highlights on the other half of the face.
The Editing
When I loaded the image into Lightroom 4, I really didn’t know what to do with the image and how my vision realizes. I started with some basic adjustments in Lightroom. I increased exposure slightly, got clarity down to almost -100% but painted the clarity back into my right eye. Now I brought the image into Photoshop and started removing blemishes in the white make up. I started NIK’s Viveza and got the structure down even more but placed again a local adjustment on my right eye to keep structure and sharpness in there. I opened OnOne’s Pefect Effects next and applied the Movie Look “Velvetees” but blended it down to about 30% opacity. In the last step I went to NIK’s Color Efex Pro and applied a bit of tonal contrast, Darken/Lighten Center and last but not least the midnight filter which I reduced to about 30% on the right eye only.
I gave it a final touch up with the healing brush and changed the opacity of the filter layer to about 80-85% to get a bit of detail back on the left half of my face.
What do you think?
Similar Posts:
- taking the hasselblad to a concert
- my first experiments with the sabatier effect
- Santa’s big surprise
- lens talk: the voigtlaender color skopar 35mm/2.5
- How I feel about macro lenses – Yashica ML Macro 55mm 1:4
thanks for the explanation. you did a great job on this. i’d like to know more about which camera setting you used. would you share the exif date? 🙂
This is compelling … brilliant interpretation of duality!
Great processing and thanks for all the technical details 🙂
Danke dir für das making of diesem genialen Foto….
was evtl. notch cool gewesen wäre ein Bild nach den einzelnen Schritte …??
Hello There. I found your blog using msn. This is a really well written article. I’ll make sure to bookmark it and come back to read more of your useful information. Thanks for the post. I will certainly comeback.
Good article. I definitely love this website. Stick with it!
A thoughtful insight and ideas I will use on my website. You’ve obviously spent a lot of time on this. Well done!
I’ll immediately grab your rss feed as I can’t find your email subscription link or newsletter service. Do you have any? Please let me know in order that I could subscribe. Thanks.
I simply want to tell you that I’m new to blogs and seriously liked you’re page. Almost certainly I’m likely to bookmark your site . You really have very good article content. Kudos for sharing with us your webpage.
As a Newbie, I am permanently searching online for articles that can help me. Thank you
Hi Thomas, jetzt habe ich mich mal wieder hier eingelogged und gemerkt wieviel spam da eigentlich ist … 🙂