Self portrait

So I decided to have a little fun in the garage after dinner tonight. It's been a few weeks since I took my camera out of the bag so I had to "scratch the itch". Trying to take portraits of yourself is not the easiest thing to do but it sure is fun and you get to try new things. Here's one of the photos from my own session tonight. What do you guys think?

I shot this with my 50 1.8, 1/200, f/7.1, ISO 125. I had one speedlight with a shoot thru umbrella camera left and another speedlight bare right behind me. I was about 4 feet away from the wall in my garage.

Nice picture, also looks like you are enjoying the time, I just find the light around ears a bit odd

The hair/rim light is too hard. You'd probably get better results by reducing the power of the bare flash and setting the flash zoom to the widest angle.

PixelMagic wrote in post #16110222
The hair/rim light is too hard. You'd probably get better results by reducing the power of the bare flash and setting the flash zoom to the widest angle.

I thought about that. I had the rim light set at 1/128 power but it was zoomed to 105mm. That's one thing that I learned afterwards, widen the zoom on a rim light.

Maybe a little diffuser on the rim light as well? It is tough when you are already down at the lowest setting and it is still too harsh. Bounce? Anything you can do to take the light right off the back of the head is going to help.

The really hard part was positioning myself in the frame so that the light behind wasn't in the shot. If I had hooked up a monitor to my camera it would have been easier but I didn't want to go through all that hassel for these. A small speedlight softbox would probably the best way to go I think. I tried bouncing the light off the wall I wasn't happy with that result, the background was turning out too bright for what I wanted. The wall is actually white (well, swiss coffee to be exact) and I did have the overhead lights on too.