Today’s exercise: separate the subject from a busy background by backlighting the hair. Fortunately I had a model handy with plenty of hair to backlight, and that model was willing to keep experimenting as long as I was. Me. Unfortunately, the challenge of getting a good shot when using a new technique takes a lot longer when you can’t look through the camera as you’re setting up the shot.

I’m sure there’s a more technical term for an accent light shot directly through the subject’s hair, but I don’t know it. I thought it was “hair light”, but it turns out that’s something else.

Self-Portrait, April 23, 2011, experiment with hair haloes.

Still, it was a pretty successful day. I took more than 100 shots and after a while I was confident enough in the setup that I could concentrate on taking self-portraits that were actually interesting to look at. Nineteen shots remain in my “keeper” bin, though I have no idea what I’ll do with them. Looking at the keepers, I can see that I have a weakness for the overly dramatic. I suppose it’s nice to even have a recognizable style at all. All these images are straight off the camera with no tweaking or even cropping. I swear they weren’t all this over-the-top. Really.

A slightly less overdramatic (and therefore less-liked by me) self-portrait.

These photos don’t necessarily represent the best (my opinion of which changes every moment anyway), but the most representative of the technique. There’s no rocket science here; I got the main lights as close to me as possible so I could turn them down pretty low. That meant less light hitting the busy wall behind me. Directly behind my head is a third light that backlights my hair. I probably should have played with different intensities of that light more.

Even though there's a lot of shadow on me, the hair halo really separates me from the background.

This is the last shot of the day, and the fill light didn’t fire at all. (It’s set to flash when it sees another light flash, but all the lights were turned down pretty far and the fill light was behind an umbrella.) That left my head very dark, but the back light really pops me out from the background. All these photos have reflections of the lights in the glass behind me. In the one above you get a particularly clear look at the spokes of the fill light’s umbrella. Reflections are a bitch, man.

One of my favorite self-portraits ever! I really like the composition, how much my face shows, and how the colors in the jersey came out on this one. By keeping things just a touch underexposed the colors get nice and saturated.

I don’t know how often I’ll actually need this technique, but it turned out to be pretty easy. Here’s the setup:

The setup for Self-Portrait Saturday

For the fill light I could have opened the curtains just off-camera to the right rather than setting up a strobe, but then I would have had to worry about shutter speed, and that was one more variable than I wanted to deal with when I couldn’t look at the result after every shot.

The setup picture itself was taken with our older camera. I propped on a footstool and set it for two-second exposure. When I heard it click, I took a picture with the main camera, which of course caused the strobes to pop and light the scene for both cameras.

It’s been a while since I’ve turned the camera on myself, but today I joined Pinup Lifestyle and was looking for a good photo to put up for my profile. I call myself a photographer over there, so I wanted the picture to be a good one. I used one of my old favorites from long ago, but that got me to thinking about some other things to experiment with.

Tonight I closed myself in a dark room with my camera (on tripod, set to ‘bulb’), remote shutter release (operated with my toes), and a pair of flashlights. My goal was to open the shutter, shine a light on one side of my face with one expression, then shine a light on the other side of my face with a different expression.

I was not entirely successful.

a flashlight, a dark room, and a long exposure

This is an early attempt using one flashlight. I just couldn’t keep still enough while also dealing with the lighting. When I went to two flashlights things got better, but getting the two sides of my face exposed equally proved impossible.

direct hit with one of the flashlights, then my toe slipped off the shutter release

Sometimes when things go wrong, however, they can come out all right. My toe slipped off the shutter release on this one, before I got to the second flashlight. After this shot I realized that I was overexposing where the flashlights hit and I cranked the aperture way down. Things got better after that.

a decent shot, but with the same expression on both sides

This was a test shot while I was adjusting the aperture. It came out pretty cool, if you ask me.

finally held still enough, but didn't get enough light on the frowny side

Given infinite time and infinite patience, I think I would have got the shot. I had neither, however, and when I began to like my test shots more than the actual attempts I decided I’d done enough. Sometimes an experiment doesn’t yield the results you expect, but that doesn’t mean the results aren’t interesting.