Featured Portrait – Self Portrait

 

Well. Not a bad shot though it was a pain to light myself properly. See how I managed to get this shot and the lighting diagram below.

 

I was bitten by the DIY bug the last few days and have spend some time ‘building stuff’. I wrote earlier about my flash diffuser.

Well. I’ve changed it and made it a little bit more friendly to the eyes. They now look like this.

See the band around them? Well, its supposed to be red (ala Canon L lenses). Cheeky!!!

See this image of the Speedlite 580EX with the flash diffuser in action.

Anyway, this self portrait was taken with 2 speedlites. My 580 EX II was mounted on my ID Mark III and was set as master. My old 580 was mounted on a tripod and was set as a slave (and also set as geroup B). I used ETTL-II and set the ratio between group A:B as 1:8 which means that the slave acted as the main light and the on camera flash acted as a fill light.

The slave was placed at 45 degrees to my left. With a little bit of careful positioning I was able to get the soft shadows effect. Very easy now especially with my new found understanding of flash as well as my new diffusers both of which I owed to Chuck Gardner though I have to say I added some modifications of my own to the diffusers.

The lighting strategy is shown below. Please click through for a bigger image.

Canon 1D Mark III
EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L at 70mm
Speedlite 580EX II
Speedlite 580 EX

f/5.6 1/200th ISO 400 manual exposure
flash fired 1:8 A:B ratio