POTW: Self Portrait

First POTW that's a self portrait. This was taken at a metropark and there were a few pictures that looked really nice (I'll get an album up eventually). Unfortunately you're stuck with a picture of yours truly.

The reason I went with this is because it's my first official use of off-camera flash outdoors. That came with a few errors. You can see the original here. Some of the stuff was because this is a self portrait. I was holding a remote shutter release and the camera was about 6 feet in front of me. The flash is hanging below the center column of the tripod, resting on top of my backpack which was hooked on to the center column of tripod for stability.

From looking at the original on location and looking at the histogram it looked like I had a properly exposed picture but it came out dark. Fortunately I took the picture in raw so I could easily increase the exposure by a stop and not lose anything. I then gave it a tighter crop and slight tweak of levels. Given the subject I was working with I'm pretty happy with my first use of flashes outside. I came out really sharp and the background has a nice bokeh effect. The black shirt seems to throw things off though and I should have had some color. Also wearing a short sleeve shirt detracts from the image which is why I had to crop out my arms. And yes, at the time I thought I was at least smiling a little bit. This is definitely better than the setup shots though.

Looking at the thumbnail on my desktop I do like it in icon form (the colors of the background with the black of the shirt) so maybe I'll use it for my profile picture in various places. This was all pretty spontaneous so didn't have any planning as far as what to wear or to shave so I'm pretty happy with it.