Tuesday, February 16, 2010

New Light - Day 47 of 365

I spent most of my free time tonight fabricating a bracket to mount my flashes to a softbox that I bought on clearance from Adorama Camera for $25 (link to details here: LINK). By the time I finished and mounted the softbox, I didn't have much time left, so I decided to test out the softbox to see if it worked alright. I snapped this picture quickly and decided to go ahead and use it as today's shot. I've never used one of these before, so I'm going to have to do some experimenting in order to get it right (hence the title).

I had the softbox with an SB-600 flash in it camera right and high (I'm looking at it). I had another SB-600 flash camera left and high with a grid on it that was pointed at the back/right side of my head.

Something that I learned about doing self portraits that I will share. Normally, it is a real pain to get the camera's autofocus to focus on your eyes (the normal focal point for portraits). I tried a few shots with the autofocus and it kept focusing everywhere except my eyes. So, I tied a string to the camera's tripod right under the lens, stretched it to where I wanted to stand and tied a knot in it to mark that length. Then, I put a light stand where the knot in my string was. I went back to the camera, focused on the stand at my eye level (I set the top of the stand at eye level, which was where I measured the location with the knot), After that, I put the camera on manual focus so it wouldn't refocus and went back to the spot where I had to stand. The get my head placement exact, I stretched the string out, positioned myself so my eye was at the knot in the string, dropped the string and then took the shot. After all of that (it really wasn't much, it just took a long time to write about it), the picture was in focus. You can also close the aperture some on the camera (which gives you a larger depth-of-field) in order to help out with focusing self-portraits.

No comments:

Post a Comment