Friday, 23-Mar-12 22:23:00 CET

Four flash self portrait

Now I made my own portrait photo for the first time. My plan was to have a fuzzy background. That was harder than I had thought with the 18 – 55 mm lens. I also tried to use my old fixed 50 mm lens but it has the drawback that it is not having any AF on the Nikon D5100 so that is not so convenient when you make a self-portrait. The idea is that you get a shorter focus length with a wider diaphragm but that effect is greater on a fixed 50 mm lens.

I used one flash pointing to me behind a white diffuser umbrella in front of me to the left. On the right I had another flash in front of me to the right that I had set up to light up the eyes. To the right behind me I had a flash lighting up my hair to create a little bit of glitter in the hair. The third flash was behind me pointing to the background.

The background flash was just lighting up one side of the background. I had problems regulating the left flash, a SunPack 26 FD, so I had shielded it with a bit of semitransparent paper used for baking actually. This made my face too yellow and the eyes did not get a distinct sparkle I had hoped for. I need to learn using the SunPack much better. It is as if all the knobs on it are making no difference all. I have two Nikon flashes, SB-25 and SB-20 and they are easy to control. My strongest flash is Metz 45 CT-3, SCA 300. For subsequent photo shoots the SunPack will get to play a much less important role.

There is room for more experiments making portraits!