Forty six

Forty six - #341/365, originally uploaded by PJMixer.

I thought a self-portrait was appropriate for my birthday. Like yesterday's shot I set up my Nikon's flash controls in commander mode to use on the pop-up and the external Speedlight. This time the Speedlight was sitting on a mini-trouble to the left of the camera. I used the diffuser I usually have on the Speedlight to soften the light a little from the pop-up. I then used a warm gold reflector to the right of the camera to fill in the shadows better on the right of my nose (although there's still a small shadow there from my cheek perhaps). If I had a third flash unit, I'd probably even out the lighting behind me. I didn't do anything too fancy trying to get the focus right (even shooting at f2.8 with my 50mm), I just took a lot and tried to have my eyes focused on the lens rather than worrying about being centred (which sometimes but my nose in and eyes out of sharp focus). A trick I did use for composition was that as I was looking into the lens (and the via the mirror thru the viewfinder I could see a clear line between dark and light that I used to get the height right. I used in-camera black & white with a green filter. I still think the shot is a little dark, but in B&W mode, unfortunately there's no D-Lighting option. With all that setup, I still did two cheats, a slight crop to show a little less of my forehead (and there's a lot of it) and spot-healed a blemish (I can do that, it's my birthday).