52 Week Challenge – Week 1: Self-portrait

I have decided to do the Dogwood 52 week photo challenge, which gives you a new photo assignment each week alternating between a portrait, landscape, and artistic photo types.  The goal of the challenge is to increase your creativity and improve your photos in each of the three areas.   I will be blogging each weeks assignment, which will show the original out of camera and the final edited image.  I will also note which setting I used and some of the edits I made.

This is week one which was to take a self-portrait.  For these images, I set up a gray backdrop (very wrinkly) behind my couch, placed a 18-55mm lens on my camera with a beauty dish on a 450EX II Speedlight on camera. I used my cell phone as a remote trigger.  The settings on the camera were ISO 200, at F4.0, with a 1/15s shutter at a focal length of 18mm. 

The first image I cropped the image to focus on my face. I then adjusted the lighting to brighten my face, then adjusted the white balance a bit, then added some vignettting, and finally blurred the backdrop to remove the wrinkles and fix some small facial flaws.

Original Image Out of Camera

Final Edited Image

The second image followed the same basic procedure of cropping, adjusting as the first image except converted the image to black and white.

Original Image Out of Camera

Final Edited Image

Overall, I’m happy with how the images came out, but did notice they were a little soft and that I really need to iron the backdrop.  Thus, I need to work on the sharpness of the image. In addition, I should have moved the flash off camera and that beauty dish that I have needs to be slightly bigger because it leaves a ring shadow in some of the photos.   

Next week is a landscape