You can barely tell I originally forgot to set white balance for this one. Although the colours are still a bit cold, I could’ve warmed it up a bit more.
I’ve always felt that portrait shots were hard to take.
Regardless if you know the subject or not, I always found it difficult to do without feeling some awkwardness and embarrassment. I’ve never really spent much time looking at how to pose someone for a photo, or how to play with lighting to capture someone’s good side. The most I do is hope for a nice sunny day, and then try some different angles of where the light is to get something nice.
Which is why self-portraits are so much harder to take.
I removed the LED lights before remembering to take a set-up photo…
It starts out with the gear.
Normally, I don’t think of my camera equipment as something that makes or breaks a good shot because I believe composition, lighting, and framing are much more important. But this time, I truly struggled because of poor equipment.
It is a little hard to frame your subject properly when you can’t see what the camera sees.
I don’t have a remote shutter.
Well, I technically do, but this IR remote shutter I had purchased off Amazon some time ago was not up to the task. It didn’t allow for half-presses, so I had to manually prepare the focus ahead of time. That ended up in tons of out-of-focus pictures, with my only solution to just try out different focuses until one seemed to be “just right”. But even then, because I had to frequently move from the camera into the frame and vice versa, my position would always vary. So even if my focus was perfect for the last shot, my movement would make the next shot out of focus.
I also faced difficulty with using the remote shutter. It uses one of those flat batteries that most people don’t have replacements on hand, so I couldn’t replace the dying battery. That meant I had little to no range with the thing, and had to manually press the shutter and set a 10 second delay. Add that to the guess-and-check focus, and my variable position, meant that after taking 30 shots to get 1 acceptable one, at least 5 minutes had gone by. That’s without accounting for the time it takes to review and adjust the camera after each shot.
Then there is the lighting.
The photo on the left-most side is the original. I forgot to account for white balance of the LED lights, forgot to control existing light, and I didn’t adjust the focus correctly! My 1st attempt at fixing it wasn’t too bad, but it was still a bit dark. The second attempt is a bit brighter, but something about the photos overall colours feel a bit artificial. Oh well. The edited ones do look nicer, but this is a problem with the source photo, so that can be fixed with just another photo.
Another problem of using lights – reflections. Maybe I need lens-less glasses for this…
I had originally hoped that I could get some sunlight from the windows, but reality wasn’t as kind. I took it as an opportunity to use my new (in that I’ve used them less than 5 times) small LED lights to brighten the subject.
Sadly, I have no idea what I’m doing with lighting. Not even a single clue. Lighting seems to be a more important thing for people who shot video, but I don’t fall under that category. I watched some lighting reviews to better see what people looked for in lights, so I could get a better sense of how people used it. I tried to watch some tutorials on how to better use lights, but none of them really helped me. The would say things like “try to brighten the subject” or “don’t mix different light sources”, or would recommend products that I don’t own (reflectors, softboxes, a background, etc).
What I wanted to learn was more of how to position multiple lights. One in the front? Is the front one supposed to be a lot brighter or dimmer than the others? Why would I put a light on the side? Do I need a light on the side? How do I handle light reflection on glasses? Is there a lighting set-up that makes the subject’s skin more flattering? How do I brighten up the subject’s hair to make it less dark?
I didn’t learn too much from how I set up my lights, and I think that:
- I don’t have enough lights
- My lights aren’t bright enough
- I’m missing reflectors
These points make it more difficult to experiment with lights to see how things change.
However, I do feel like I learned more about how to pose a subject. Especially when I did more stupid and weird poses. By being the subject, and then reviewing the results of the different things I would try as the subject, I now better understand what kinds of expressions look better. How much of a smile is too much? Where do the eyes look? How should the face be angled relative to the camera? Is there a prop to use, and how should you use it?
If nothing else, this will help me present a bit more… flattering side of myself to others.
It also got me to buy a new remote shutter! The new one I bought can now half-press the shutter to focus, and the wireless range on it isn’t garbage. It also has some additional features that I haven’t read too much about yet, but it looks great so far. Sadly it uses 4 AAA batteries, which is a slight inconvenience (as well as being a huge power drain). I would try this project again, but the next week of forecast doesn’t include any sun – only a lack of it.
Oh, but I do need to update my LinkedIn photo and probably my work photo too… Natural lighting will be hard to find the next few weeks, so it looks like my next blog will more lighting! Although… I might end up with some more equipment than last time.
Though my self-made lighting photoshoot wasn’t very fruitful. Later on, the sunlight came shining through my windows, so I took that opportunity to snap some more shots without worrying about the lighting. I didn’t try anything new, and instead just tried to get a cleaner shot of something I did last time. Natural light is so much more easier to work with. It looks much nicer on a subject’s skin, and it also illuminates the background well. My small LED lights can barely brighten the subject, how could I ask it to brighten the background? I had no trouble at all getting better shots this time. I guess it did help that I already fixed the focus problem though!
I still had to colour correct this one. The first one was too warm because I hadn’t changed my white balance from before, but after a little change, I honestly rather like it.
Accounting for Cameras 