self-portrait: calm © Lilly Schwartz 2012
After a grey and rainy morning my friend Guido came over for some coffee and music. This meant that I only had the morning to take some pictures and I didn’t exactly feel like venturing out into the rain. I watched a really nice Sally Mann documentary and suddenly felt inspired. I got my tripod out and set up the camera with my 50mm f/1.4 lens, with some black cushions as a backdrop. Without a cable release shooting this was actually quite difficult, since I’m using the lens on a crop body and the shutter button is just out of reach when I fit in the frame. Focussing sure was difficult like that, but it gave me this serendipitous effect, which I found very cool.
I sharpened the picture a little to make the focus on the hair more obvious and converted to black and white with a combination of a black and white adjustment layer and a channel mixer, focussing on the blues. Then I did something that I hadn’t considered before: I applied a texture! It was a stained paper texture from lostandtaken.com, where you can find tons of amazing textures as donationware. What an awesome and useful resource! The texture really made a difference and gives it a look as if coming from film. I’m really happy with the result.
It is indeed a great effect – very nice sp.
Thanks Richard! 🙂
Amazing texture and combination of techniques. I love it. I would be interested how this picture would look like overexposed and with a white backdrop. Because the title does not convince me 100% It is more dreamy…
I tried the overexposed bit, but I didn’t much care for it. The white backdrop would be an idea, but it probably would take some effort to make the hair still look realistic. For my favourite overexposed self-portrait you can check out this one, if you like: http://www.lillyschwartz.com/2011/11/13/sleep-photographing/ Thanks for stopping by 🙂
I definitely love this one 😀
Thanks 🙂 and thanks for stopping by also!
This is absolutely wonderful, Ms. S.
Personally the low-key works very well for me here…especially considering your inspiration / work with texture / aging, etc.
I particularly LOVE the lost and found you’ve created with the shallow depth of field / plane of focus…
lovely!
🙂
Thank you so much for the kind words! I’m also particularly in love with this picture and I’m glad you like it as well! In fact I’m actually considering to make a series of pictures in the same style 🙂 Just need to find some people to shoot!
That sounds AWESOME, Ms. S! I suspect if you share/show images like this with/to potential models they would be thrilled to sit for you!
🙂
I will probably get some of my pictures printed soon. Then it will be easier to find potential models 🙂
Beautifully done…thanks for explaining the processing! I love the added texture, it really does look like film!
Thanks Tammy! I’m really surprised that it worked so well! In fact I didn’t know it was so easy to blend in a texture like that. When I tried something similar some years ago Photoshop just wasn’t as good yet and it looked just horrible. Thanks for stopping by 🙂
Beautiful!
Thanks Madelaine! 🙂
peace !