The first topic for this challenge is – self portrait. Damn! If there is one thing that I don’t like, I don’t like being photographed. As much as I enjoy taking photos, I hate being on the other side of the lens. But what has to be done has to be done.
First of all, I decided it’s not going to be a usual selfie. There’s nothing special in taking the photo similar to the one that can be found on your ID. I also didn’t have enough time to make some special kind of setup and to create the whole composition that I will be a part of. So I opted for a closeup which will then be edited in Photoshop.
I put my camera on a tripod, set a remote trigger and stood before the lens. Click! Nope… Too ordinary. Then I turned off the lights, took a flashlight and put it below my face. ISO was set to 100, the aperture was f/5.3, and the shutter speed was 1/20 s. Another shot, and here I am:
My first rule – I always shoot RAW. That gave me the opportunity to make some nice adjustments during the post-processing. In Photoshop, I increased the shadows slider and the blacks slider to the max, so that more details would be brought out. I also turned up the whites to strengthen the contrast. This way I got a nice, spooky selfie. But it was still too boring.
I hate these pimples and blackheads, so the first thing was to use a Spot Healing Brush tool to remove them. Everything is allowed when you try to be as little imperfect as possible 🙂
The next step – I added a new Hue/Saturation layer, decreased the saturation slider all the way down, and the photo went to grayscale. Then I used the layer mask to remove the grayscale from the eye area. I also added another couple of layers so I could increase saturation and contrast a little bit inside the eyes, and one more to reduce the lightest areas on the face. Finally, I created a new layer with reduced transparency where I used the white brush to make the white areas in the eyes a little more white, so the green color would be more noticeable.
And finally, here’s the result:
And that was it for the first day of this challenge. To be honest, the topic itself wasn’t too hard, the only thing I needed was an idea what to do with the selfie once it’s taken. I hope this one was good enough.
What do you think? What do you like the most? What would you do differently? Please leave your comment below, I would love to hear as many opinions as possible.
Until tomorrow 🙂
P.S.
You can also follow my work on Facebook, Instagram and 500px (here you can also buy some of my photos).
What do you think? What do you like the most? What would you do differently? Please leave your comment below, I would love to hear as many opinions as possible.
Vladimir Tomić Photography 