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.
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Vladimir Tomić Photography 