Silly Self-Portraits

[Llywellyn]

Still playing around with some new techniques and having a blast doing it. The most recent result of all my tomfoolery:

http://www.theoriginalblackcat.com/photos/249771292-L.jpg

:D

Thanks for stopping by! :thumb

[Icebear]

Awesome lips. We gotta get together for a drink sometime!!:D

[Icebear]

Lose the green background.

[Llywellyn]

Awesome lips. We gotta get together for a drink sometime!!:D

:rofl I'm always up for a tag-up shoot. Get me out of the house! I work from home. And, well, you've seen the result if I stay cooped up too long.

Lose the green background.

LOL! I remember Schmoo saying that to me on another photo once. I love my green walls, dang it! :D

[ChatKat]

The images are wonderful! Great light/exposure and fun captures.

[schmoo]

LOL! I remember Schmoo saying that to me on another photo once. I love my green walls, dang it! :D

My sentiment was the opposite though. I LOVE those walls! (lose, love, just one letter different :lol3) But I hate doing any painting myself. :D

Very cute SPs :clap Are you experimenting with lighting here?

[Llywellyn]

The images are wonderful! Great light/exposure and fun captures.

Thank you! :lust

My sentiment was the opposite though. I LOVE those walls! (lose, love, just one letter different :lol3) But I hate doing any painting myself. :D

Very cute SPs :clap Are you experimenting with lighting here?

This was my first time ever painting, and will likely be my last for quite some time. :rolleyes

I am experimenting with light as well as flattering portrait angles for heavier body types. I'm also trying out some new post-processing techniques with tricky color management--because I'm not so good with the color management (hence why so much of my stuff appears in B&W :D). This is an attempt at slight cross-processing.

[urbanaries]

these are AMAZING! I just love the lighting, the lipstick, the angles, and I think the green walls give it a nice vintage feel. Awesome lighting of your eyes and glasses...those are tricky! These photos make me want to get to know you. :clap

Can you share a bit of your color management/skin tone workflow? Did you gel the lights? If so how did the green walls factor in there?

[Llywellyn]

these are AMAZING! I just love the lighting, the lipstick, the angles, and I think the green walls give it a nice vintage feel. Awesome lighting of your eyes and glasses...those are tricky! These photos make me want to get to know you. :clap

Can you share a bit of your color management/skin tone workflow? Did you gel the lights? If so how did the green walls factor in there?
Thank you! :lust Actually, thank you for bringing up the glasses--I was also experimenting to ensure I had no glare on them, after reading so much on these boards about that issue. I'd avoided photographing myself with my glasses on because of it. I used the "tilt the glasses down" trick in that first panel (upper left) to make it look like they were sitting correctly while avoiding the glare.

I'm using one strobe, which was above me and camera right, with a shoot-through umbrella. I use an AlienBees SB400 with a custom WB setting on my Nikon D80: 3900. I sat in front of the green wall a good ways because my first test shots had too strong a shadow behind me. This put an off-white couch to my right for a reflector, instead of more of the green wall. I did have a window about 10 feet in front of me, but today was extremely rainy and overcast. Very little of the ambient light got picked up (to get a proper exposure without the strobe, I had to have a 1 sec or slower shutter speed).

Once I got it into post-processing, I used the trick in this tutorial (http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1091766) to get my magenta values down below my yellow (while working in RGB). I also used this quick skin retouching tutorial (http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1078946).

To add that slight vintagey feel without futzing up the skin tones, I added a Curves layer adjustment for the cross-process effect (though I tweak this for each photo I'm playing with so it looks right). For this image, the values for points added to each channel were as follows:

Red: 0, 0; 87, 88; 223, 243; 255, 255
Green: 0, 0; 98, 98; 205; 225; 255, 255
Blue: 0, 20; 255, 241

...holy katz I've learned a lot from these boards. Crickey! :huh

Did that help at all?

Here's the exif (http://www.theoriginalblackcat.com/photos/newexif.mg?ImageID=249771292) as well, in case that proves helpful.

[NeilL]

It's time we had some culture in here!!



Llywellyn’s Charisma

Llywellyn enthralls
backed up by her walls
(if you’re Irish, then
Heaven’s skies are Green!);

a feminine “bear”
with a magistrate’s stare
she breasts surges of
geekish technique!

Self-admittedly
capacious,
voracious,
(and possibly loquacious?)
storms of ideas flash atop!

With a camera she takes,
in Photoshop remakes
and delivers
uncompromising “pop!”.

[Llywellyn]

Llywellyn’s Charisma
Wow, I inspired poetry! I haven't done that since...well, since I was dating another writer! :giggle

Thank you, Neil. :D

(And I am, by nature, loquacious in my writing. Not so much in person. :wink)

[pyry]

Still playing around with some new techniques and having a blast doing it. The most recent result of all my tomfoolery:


Looks to me like that lipstick was made for those pictures, especially number three!

Good work :D