Poo-Poo Platter

Here’s another self-portrait that was inspired by some of Zack Arias’s work (can you tell I’m a fan?). I’ve been wanting to explore low key photos more and create moodier images to balance out all the goofy, playful stuff I typically do for 365 Days. I also wanted to get more practice controlling and restricting light to just where I want it to go. After reading Zack’s latest blog posts, I finally found something that I wanted to emulate and learn from.

This photo is actually more the result of a hybrid of knowledge gained from reading both Zack’s blog and the Strobist blog. The basic principles of killing ambient light I learned from Strobist. Using a single light creatively I gleaned from Zack’s blog.

The image below shows what the lighting was like in my apartment for the shot. It was taken 2 hours after the original photo, but the lighting was pretty close. It was an overcast night in Bellevue. ;)

To kill the ambient light, I shot at 1/250th sec at f/11 and ISO 200. That was fast enough to give me a black frame even with the tracklights on. My speedlight was set at 1/16th power, which, combined with the distance from me and careful posing, was just enough light to illuminate my shoulder and fall off quickly down my back. Shooting at f/11 also helped in that regard, since such a small aperture really restricted how much light my camera picked up. I know that whole business about inverse square law also applies here, but that kind of math doesn’t work easily in my head.

Anyhow, as I’m learning more and more, finding the “right” exposure and controlling the lights properly is actually a really easy thing to do. For the most part, it’s all a technical exercise, and, as long as you know some basic numbers, you can get the lights setup fairly quickly. What’s more difficult is figuring out exactly what you want the final image to look like. I’ve always been really good with the “how” part. Now I’m zeroing in on the “what” and “why”.