I find it much easier to practice portrait photography on myself than on friends or family who often have limited patience with me wanting to tweak the flash levels, adjust try a different angle, or get just one more shot in. Take this photo for example, I was trying to achieve two things:
- Get some updated head shots that I could use online or at work
- Experiment with low key portrait shots
For anyone not familiar low key portrait photography emphasizes the lights and darks. Generally you’ll see a very dark background with no distractions, and the only part of the face illuminated. It’s a striking look though one that in the end I did not fully capture with this image. While the background is I think suitably dimmed, most of my face is quite well lit, I suspect due to working with on-camera flash.
Although I did not achieve the look I was originally going for I’m really happy with this image. I took several shots with slightly different angles to them and most of them were more traditional headshots, but with this one I managed to capture myself laughing, not an easy thing to do when doing self-portraits.
Now I may need to invest in additional lighting to try low-key photography again.
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