Selfies

This morning I wanted to test a new lens camera combination and had no one handy, so decided to do a self portrait, also known as a selfie.  Selfies have been done since at least the early 1900s, but have become popular with the advent of digital photography.  Unfortunately, many that I have seen posted on Facebook and other social media are of pretty poor quality.  Usually it's due to poor lighting, although sometimes poor focus, wrong F-stop or shutter speed, or poor composition, too.  But if you know what you're doing and follow the basic rules, a pretty good image can be captured.  For the image below, I used filtered window light to soften the light hitting me, shot at an f-stop of 2 with a 50mm lens to throw the background out of focus, and used a tripod.  And I shot in RAW.  To diffuse the light, I used a translucent shower curtain liner over the window, although could have used white rip-stop nylon, too.

Two of the four photos that I shot for this I liked.  The one I liked best I did some minor post processing on (cleaned some hair that was across my face, lightened some shadows).  The result is below.  Had this been a photo of someone else, I would have gone over the image with them, finding out if they wanted more or less post processing, and what they might want done to it.

If you click on the photo, you can see it pretty much life size - that may be a scary thought, ha ha.

If I had a remote trigger for this camera, I could have stepped back a bit farther from the camera.  However, the remote trigger was my left arm and that was as far as it would go.

I hope that this lets you see what can be done.  I know that not all selfies will allow for the amount of control I used for this one.  However, reflectors can also work very well, even when the reflector is the side of a building or sand at the beach.

As always, hope you all had a great weekend and a beautiful week.