night time self portraits

Qarik

ehhh..not my best work but different for me. This was in my backyard and I had started when the lighting was so much more interesting but it took me so long to arrange things that I ended up shooting in the dark and suffered low exposure noise. oh well.

I am reading Joe McNally's "Hot Shoe Diarys" right now and I was attempting to semi recreate a shot from there. This one was lit with lumiquest softbox with an CTO gelled SB800 camera left and above and small fill flash from the onboard commander which had light red gel on it for fun. This was also shot in aperture priority mode which is rare for me. I had kicker sb600 lighting up the pergola in the background but as I was moving around I blocked the IR and never noticed it stopped firing.:cry (lets go nikon pocketwizards!)

And how the hell are you supposed to focus on empty air when using the self timer? lol

Richard

Qarik wrote:

And how the hell are you supposed to focus on empty air when using the self timer?

You can get pretty close if you use manual focus. Stand where you expect to be and focus on the tripod head, then mount the camera on the tripod. The distance should not change by much.

Nice light.

pathfinder

Use the AF on the camera with a cable release, with an aperture of 5.6 or 8. Then turn off the AF and shoot to your hearts content

That's how I did mine.

divamum

Richard wrote:

You can get pretty close if you use manual focus. Stand where you expect to be and focus on the tripod head, then mount the camera on the tripod. The distance should not change by much.

Remote release is the way to go. Less running around, and better focusing.

My most recent challenge was shooting a new promo shot for myself OF myself at 24hrs notice (long story). I wanted natural light and very shallow DOF, but DANG that's hard to do when you're on the wrong side of the camera (and are also acting as mua and stylist too...) Frustrating because I got some great expressions, but they were OOF because the focus point missed, or grabbed the wrong thing; sooooOOOooo many serious duds. The shot I finally got is good for my purposes, but there are photographic things I don't like about it still; I suspect that project will be revisited a few more times until I REALLY nail it ....

Qarik, you've already commented on the two things I notice, namely the focus and the sky noise. I can see where you're going with this - look forward to the next batch you post!

adbsgicom

Don't know if you did this, but set the only focus point on your camera to the right one so it will focus on you. Main thing, don't let the camera decide what to focus on....

Qarik

adbsgicom wrote:

Don't know if you did this, but set the only focus point on your camera to the right one so it will focus on you. Main thing, don't let the camera decide what to focus on....

yes this is what I did. Except I believe the AF focuses as soon as you press the shutter which starts the count down. The issue is that I am not in place when I press that shutter! I lost my mini remote. I had to move my flash stand and manual focus on that to "approximately" where I was standing. The issue is that when I am so close to the camera .. DOF is shallow and I can't get spot on focus. hmmmmm