Low Key Self Portrait Photography

Posted by on Feb 27, 2014 in News
Low Key Self Portrait Photography

The other night I was experimenting with low key photography using only my canon 430 ex ii speedlite with a softbox, oh yeah and my camera.. The problem I had was everyone was in bed, it was only 8:30pm even the dog had gone to bed.. Anyway, I decided to just try the low key photography on myself. My very first selfie I guess.? Here is what I did. I got an old mic stand (another story but hey-ho) and used it to fix the focal point. I positioned the speedlite above the focal point (mic stand) and then set up the camera onto the tripod. First things first, I put the camera into manual mode, set the shutter speed to 1/250th of a sec, no faster as this would be too fast for the camera to sync up with the flash. The ISO to 100 and the aperture to f5.6 this ensured that if I took a photo without the flash the whole frame would be in total darkness. Now here’s the trick, the flash was set to ETTL and turned on, (I did forget to turn it on and thought that something was wrong – doh!). The camera was set to timer and as I used a remote flash to trigger the shots. All the lights were on in the room and there was no black background used either. I must admit I do like the photograph a lot and I am not a big fan of photographs of myself, I just like the way the light falls and the clarity of the image. I hope you like the photograph too, I know I’m no model but hey, it doesn’t look to bad, eh?. 🙂

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