Dan Perovich's Cyberfront Property

1/500 sec @ f/4.0, ISO 100, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II)  I received an email the other day from one of the photography newsletters to which I subscribe.  One of the inlaid pictures was of a portrait with a prominent shadow.  Unfortunately, I did not remember which newsletter it was in.  But that is where GMail search saved the day.  The link in the newsletter was to a weekly challenge on the website forum.

I decided I wanted to play around with the same concept in a self-portrait.  I figured that I would need two lights: one to create the shadow on the wall and light one side of my face, and another to fill in the shadows on the other side.  It took a bit of playing around to find the right combination of light power and modification to achieve the desired result.

In the end, the setup consisted of a bare headed flash at camera left.  It was positioned knee high and sat about 4 feet away from me.  The second flash was positioned at camera right.  It was set at the height of my eyes and was gridded.  The grid was important to make sure that the light from the fill light only hit me and not the wall behind me.  If it hit the wall behind me, a second shadow would have appeared on the wall.

I feel like I rushed this shoot.  I really wanted to get the complete shadow in the picture with me, but I grew tired of taking a picture, walking back to the camera, studying the results, making an adjustment to the lights, taking another picture, etc.  I feel like I am rushing more and more shots these days and not giving myself an adequate amount of time to get the results that I desire.  I am going to try to recognize when I am doing this during a shoot and curtail it.  I do not want this project to start to feel like a chore.  Unfortunately, that is where it will head if I do not remind myself each day about why I am doing this and the progress I have made so far from all my hard work.