Five-Minute Self Portrait Photo Project

I wanted to get a few portraits of myself for my Classic Rock radio station Facebook pages and wanted something a little more ‘edgy’ and hard to fit the rock format. One morning the light coming from the east was very nice. So I grabbed the camera with the 18mm wide-angle lens and fired up a cigar. I knew with the wide angle and depth of field I would be pretty close with focus and getting myself in the frame. So I positioned myself in the east-facing doorway of our old garage and started shooting. I hand-held the camera at arm’s length, shooting a few frames with the motor drive then “chipping” to see what I was getting.

I wanted to prove you can get great self-portraits doing the old “hold the camera at arms-length and fire away” method that so many of us do to get ourselves in the picture at the Grand Canyon, at the concert, or with friends at the party. I used a little fill flash from the built-in strobe, dialed down to –2 on most of the images to kick the available light just a touch.

I have adolescent memories of a San Francisco Bay Area TV show host back in the late 60’s early 70’s named Bob Wilkerson. He hosted at late night weekend TV show called ‘Creature Feature’…introducing all the really bad ‘B movie’ horror and cheesy sci-fi flicks from the 1950’s. He sat in a big easy chair puffing away on his stogie! I wanted to get a similar feel to my photo of mystery and macabre with the slow shutter speed blur of the smoke that I had seen done so well by a famous photojournalist years back.

I’m not promoting smoking for all you ‘kids’ out there… It becomes a prop with the shade and my hat to add that element of hip mystery to the image. In post-production, I added some more contrast and edge to the images to get a look that is currently very popular with photographers, advertising and magazine covers.