Call Me Badass

The other day I looked in the mirror after I had been driving. I was still wearing my hat and shades, and I had to laugh. With my too-long-untrimmed beard I looked like, well, not me.

Yeah, not so much a mild-mannered geek as a stereotype from from central casting to be in the background for a scene in a “rough” bar. (Which, in fact, I was once paid to be.)

There are other shots in the batch that don’t make it obvious I was using shoot-through umbrellas (you can see them pretty clearly in the glasses), but I chose these based on different treatments of the light, and for my expressions. It’s a slow process when you have to stop and go behind the camera to see how a shot worked, then getting back in front and duplicating your head angle but altered just a smidge. So getting the reflections under control never really happened.

By the way, the background for those shots is a sneak peek at the shoot I’ll be doing with Harlean (who is a fiction) this afternoon. A shaky phone-camera look behind the scenes:

The set for today's shoot.

The set for today’s shoot.

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6 thoughts on “Call Me Badass

    • Yeah, it does. Which added a challenge to the self-shoot: I wanted the lens open pretty wide, but I couldn’t be sure exactly what the auto-focus would choose. So I put it on manual and used marks to get my head at just the right distance. Some good shots were lost because I was a couple of inches too far back. The second shot of the three above is probably over the line.

      • I’ve run into that problem too. I will usually enable the focus point indicator in playback mode and do a bunch of trial shots to get it on the mark, while making sure I stand and pose consistently between test shots. A pain in the ass. I got an X20 recently as a carry-around-everywhere camera, and it has this always-on, facial recognition mode that gets around the problem nicely. Just turn it on, and it locks onto the closest face it detects and tracks it.

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