I Tried. I Gave Up

[daq7]

Trent Reznor is not God. I know this, because Trent Reznor exists.

[Don Schaeffer]

Really fine portrait.

[daq7]

Thanks Don.

[gahspidy]

Daq, i like the look and pose of this SP. Nice tight crop, good mood and expression. Looks very natural. I think the lighting is interesting with the main light coming in from camera upper right, although you do not stand out very well on the left from the wall behind you. Not that big an issue, a reflector or slight rim/hair light might help define you from the bg some more.
What i'm not crazy bout is the softness of the image, or lack of good sharpness and the strange colors in the skin Not natural, and over saturated.
I'm wondering why your setting your camera setting as you do for these portraits and other shots where you use flash. This was 4.0 second exposure, and an f stop of 22 at 400 iso.
Weird things happening with ambient light and flash as well as softness coming from some inevitable movement at that exposure.
The flash is not really affected by shutter speed, so if you had the exposure at 4.0 sec or at 1/250 sec, the flash would expose the same. Its really only affected by your iso and your aperture.What your doing with that exposure time is allowing ambient light to come into play and mix with your colors. A good starting point for your settings of SP, using flash as you are would be 1/160 at about 6.7 -8.0 at 100 or 200 iso. Try that out some time and see what happens. If you need to bring exposure up, you can increase output on your strobes, and/or just open aperture a bit more.
I like what your up to, Daq and think you have some fine ideas at work here, I just feel you must get away from these long shutter settings with these portraits and let the flash handle it. Also, if you try these settings and use flash as your light source, make sure to set your cameras WB to Flash

[daq7]

Ok Gary. Probably going to do some shots tonight, and I will set up as you say. I intended to do that, but I put it on aperature mode and see that it wants a 30 second exposure at F8 and I just keep getting confused and trying to compromise. I am going to try to do some portraits of the wife again tonight, but am going to try to get my best diffuser more right in front of her to avoid the cross lighting.

I am still going to try to do a soft and 1/3rd as bright light from in front low. We will see how it works.

[daq7]

Oh, and while I actually like the weird softness in this particular shot, it ain't what I intended to do.

[Frog]

Another good pose, composition. Your skin that isn't hit by light is too red for me.
REALLY red.

Also, your the title is a lie if you are going to try it again:wink5:

[Anbesol]

lol. Daq - as soon as I saw the title I said, 'hey, thats trent'. Curious to see if it was just a coincidental wording, it appears intentional.

Anyway, I personally would go for a more neutral color, though I understand you may specifically want this type of color tone. Just my take.

Wow it really is f/22 4 sec. Why did you choose that anyway?

[daq7]

" Wow it really is f/22 4 sec. Why did you choose that anyway?"

Um, because when it is dark I get scared and confused.

But seriously it's hard to explain. When i am doing the chamelion shots, I want the long exposures. And frankly even here there are things I like about the effect. I tried to explain above, but it basically comes down to some confusion about how the ITTL works in manual mode. I wanted the f22 for wide DOF so I would not have focusing issues. I wanted to minimize the exposure period so I bumped it up to f 400 to get it down to 4 seconds. I really SHOULD just have put it on manual and shot f8 at 1/60 as Gary said. I even KNEW this, but for some reason I resisted. I have some technical sense of what to do, but my instincts still betray me at times.

I will shoot something the RIGHT way tonight or tomorrow.

[daq7]

"lol. Daq - as soon as I saw the title I said, 'hey, thats trent'. Curious to see if it was just a coincidental wording, it appears intentional."

Oh yeah. Intentional. Was getting really frustrated. Like that motorcycle chase scene in the Matrix where one of the ghost twins looks at the other and says, "We are getting very aggravated..."

[n8]

I think it'd been neat to see some kind of nin'ish art in there or maybe a morbid textural overlay...which of course is the kind of stuff I'm learning at the moment.

[daq7]

Give me time counsel. Baby steps for now. I agree, and the textural overlay stuff is on the way eventually. In this case the contribution of NIN was just the whole I would rather burn the world than deal with this adolescent BS.

[GB1]

Too redish, but fun image regardless. Have you tried converting to B&W?

Daq, I think these self portraitures are really cool but that the technical aspects could be better. However, it depends on what you're shooting for. Artsy shots absolutely do not need to be, or maybe should not be, technically perfect. If so, don't sweat the rest of my observations. I don't know about the composition here: not sure I like the way the top of your head is almost hitting the top of the frame. It also seems we should be able to see more of your wrist - it seems chopped off to me. The image is a little grainy and there's a little less detail in the bright areas than I would like. I can't tell if that's because of movement or perhaps you started with a very dark image and the post processing of it to this destroyed some of the detail (?)

Anyway, enough babble by me.. Gb

[daq7]

Thanks GB1. I have to be honest that what I am shooting for now is some sort of technical proficiency. Once I understand how things work I will have more ability to break the rules on purpose rather than because of what I don't know.

I am trying to get perfect lighting without using studio lights (just strobes), and without having a big enough soft box.

Thanks for the inputs.