Dan Perovich's Cyberfront Property

1/125 sec @ f/4.0, ISO 100, 70 mm (EF70-200mm f/4L IS USM)

I decided to try another self portrait today to see if I could apply some of the lessons I have learned since taking my last one.  Two of the things I wanted to exercise were the camera to subject and subject to background distances as well as some posing techniques.

The first thing I did was measure eight feet from the wall in our dining/living room.  I put one of my two light stands in this spot.  I then paced off eight more feet away from the wall and from the spot I just marked.  This is where I placed my camera.  I popped the 70-200mm lens on the 7D so that I could compress the background as much as possible and get a really sharp imagine with my best piece of glass.

The next step was to set up the background light.  I decided to go with a gridded flash.  I wanted the effect of a circle of light on the brown wall in the background.  I swapped in a pot holder with the light stand  currently in the middle of the room.  I lowered this stand as far as it would go and placed the gridded 430EX II strobe on it.  I moved it to just behind the pot holder mark and pointed it up at forty-five degrees to the wall. I took my best guess as to where it needed to be aimed.

At this point, I took a couple of test shots with just the background light.  I knew I wanted my aperture at f/4.0 and my ISO at 100, so I locked those in right away.  I do not remember why I chose a shutter speed of 1/125 sec.  Usually I shoot this type of shot at 1/250 to eliminate as much, if not all, of the ambient light as possible.  The setting that I cared most about during these few test shots was the background flash power.  Thanks to the 7D, I was able to adjust this setting very quickly in the flash menu on the camera.

Next, I set up the Apollo twenty-eight inch soft box on camera left.  I brought it as close to my marked spot as possible without letting it get into the frame.  I started with the soft box pointing at my mark and at a forty-five degree angle relative to the camera.  However, as I got into the shooting, I slowly changed this angle to more of a thirty-five or forty degree angle and feathered the light across my face.

The posing technique that I was playing with was where to have the subject stare while taking the pictures.  In this image, I was staring at the Canon emblem right above the lens of the camera.  This method is said to open up the subject’s eyes for a more compelling portrait.