Selfie

These days your privacy works differently than before. You may put a snap up on FB for your friends, and the whole world can see it. Which means: what was meant for your intimate mates may influence your business. Would you want the most beautiful day in your life to be photographed by someone who smacks any kind of selfie on the web, for the whole world to be seen? That is not the kind of approach to photography I would like to see at my wedding.

Your profile pic is the first thing many people notice. So it is important. I had a rough grainy image up, where you can just see that it depicts someone flashing into the camera. I decided to put up something more commercial. Something that tells people what I look like, and how I would like the world to see me.

Black and white, I stuck with that, because it is more “photo” and less an imprint of reality. The photographer has done more to make an abstraction from the face. And I remember those days when we spent many hours in the darkroom to develop our film, and make beautiful prints. It would take you something like 5 minutes to see what the print is like. And if you wanted something different, you’d have to start over and spend another 7 minutes or so, to see what will come out. And when the print is dry (you develop it in liquids) it looks different, so after waiting an hour for it to dry you may have to redo it anyway. This takes seconds, these days. (Well, some of these photo studios print your photos differently from what you had in mind: they have software, that automatically adjusts your photo to something a programmer in the factory thinks is what the average person will want to see, not what you had in your artistic mind….) But those days of the darkroom are over, most photography is digital these days. Anyway, I decided to us black and white. A headshot, because these avatars are small, and if you put more then a face there, it will come out so small it does not tell the viewer what I look like.

Straight on, a kind of standard approach. Again, you could be very artistic, but on 180x180 pixels you have very little space to do so. And that means your artistic vision may get lost. Better to be conservative, and go for a face. I lit it from the front, with an umbrella. A few years ago, most portraits took three lights, but I find beauty in simplicity these days. Also, if you photograph someone who is not used to this kind of work, a lot of equipment may be intimidating, and cause your subject to be stiff in the photo. While one stand with an umbrella is something most people can get used to in a couple of minutes. And with one light, you have less technical stuff to worry about, so you can concentrate on the subject.

In this case the subject is me, the angle is decided, one light, slightly to the (camera) right, so on the left you see a bit of shadows in my face, which nicely shows the shape of my head. Dark background, so I jump out at you, but not flat black, that would make my head float in space, like an astronaut in a science fiction film. I want it to be grounded. If I wanted the background flat black, I would make more space between the subject and the background so the light is further away from it, and I would flag the light to block any light falling on my background. This background is painted wood, if you use black velvet, it will be much darker.

Now sharpness: I want to appear sharp in my profile pic, to not give the viewer the mistaken idea that I am careless about the technical quality of my work. Some people may have hi-tech equipment, like an app that you can see the photo you are about to make on your i-Phone. Very helpful, but I don’t have that level of hi-tech. So I placed an unused light stand where I would be standing, with the top at my eye level. I focused on that, and activated the self timer. I stepped in the place of the stand, and the photo was made. Inevitably, I found that my ear was sharper then my eye. For a standard portrait you focus on the eye. If the head is at an angle from the camera, you usually focus on the eye closest to the camera, but you may want to focus on the eye further away from the camera. Your choice. In this case the eyes are at about the same distance, and I redid the pic, making sure now my eyes were where the stand was, so that the focus would be on my eye. Almost right this time, good enough for a low res profile pic.

Exposure: I checked the histogram of the first photo and you see it is almost totally on the left side.

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(photo 1) That is underexposure. I want a dark background, but my face should be bright (I am Caucasian, for African skin you would want more to the left to be realistic). So I increased the flash output by a full stop (from ¼ to ½) Now it came out good. You see that there is more on the left, because of the dark background and the dark sweater that I am wearing but there is information almost all the way to the right. You would not want flat whites in this photo, that would be too bright and take the colour out of my skin. (Usually flat whites are not nice. If you have them in clothes like a wedding dress, you lose the structure of the material. And the bride has chosen that dress with care, she wants to see the material in the photos. Sometimes you get prints with flat whites in the wedding dress. This is not the way it should be. Often wedding photos should be low contrast. That also adds to the romantic feeling and gives smooth skin.)

But my expression: from all that technical hullaballoo I was looking too serious and troubled. I should be looking interested, relaxed, but serious. It should not say: I am a party animal who has so much fun at your wedding that I forget the photos. It should say: I am serious about this photo, as I am serious about the work I make for you. So I tried a few more. One was too smily, one was out of focus, one was not quite right, though I don’t really know what the problem is. And then one came out that I think is good. This one shows me, the way I would want you to see me.

I took it through photoshop: I made the shadows a bit bluish, and the highlights a bit yellowish. That way it gets a bit of depth: the sunlit parts of a colour photo are a bit yellowish, and the shadows are lit by the blue sky, which makes them bluish. Then I decided to add a red border, to lighten the mood a little, and give it more attention value. Red is a very strong colour: in nature there are only small areas of pure red, like flowers. This in contrast to the vast blue sky and green foliage. In the dry season there is a lot of brownish yellow. So our eye is used to a lot of these colours. But since red only appears in small areas, it attracts a lot of attention. It may help someone notice my profile. (this phenomenon can also cause problems: in a colour photograph, a small area of red can attract a lot of

attention, so if it is in the wrong place, like an unrelated background element, you have a problem in your photo)

By the way: if you want to know what lighting was used, often you can see the reflection in the eyes. Here you can see a star-like catch-light, that tells you I used an umbrella.