Today I'm going to show you 3 creative self-portrait ideas that you can easily shoot at home.
Well hello again you beautiful mother photographers, I hope you're all doing well and you're keeping healthy and safe during these very weird times. may remember I tried out a bunch of self-portrait ideas shenanigans. Seeing as we're still in isolation in the UK and the fact that I actually had a really good time shooting all those photos I thought I'd give it another try this week and come up with a few more portrait ideas for you. Just like in the last video I'll be shooting all 3 of these ideas on a 50mm lens so you have absolutely no excuse not to give them a try yourselves. Right, that's enough talking lets the check-in with past me to see how I'm getting on setting up for the first shot that I've already taken but he's not taken because he's in the past. I've taken it because I'm in the present. But maybe this is the past for you? OK let's just go to Tom. Hello everyone and welcome to another exciting episode of how to dismember a body in your living room. No the reason why my living room looks like a killing zone is because we're going to be playing around with coca... flour. Definitely flour. So the idea here is dead simple I'm going to cover my face in flower and then we're going to take some flash photography to freeze the motion as the flour's flying around the room. Hence this. I've learnt from my mistakes. It's a relatively easy setup I've got here. Basically, I've blocked out all of the window light as much as I can by just shutting the blinds. I'm going to turn the lights off in a minute as well just so this room is really really dark. Two flashguns pointed at the back of my head. The reason for this is that we want to keep all of the light away from that back wall because any the light that hits that wall is just going to bounce around and it's going to brighten it up we want to keep that wall as dark as possible so that only the flour is illuminated and it becomes really contrasty against the background. To help with this and to narrow the the spread of light rather than using modifiers my flashguns come with a zoom setting which basically allows you to focus the beam of light coming out at the end of the flashgun. So I've set that all the way to 200mm and that should mean that we get a nice a narrow beam of light onto my head and less light being spread around the room sideways. As for the flour, it's nothing special it's just plain white flour that I've dug out the cupboard. As always to help me with this self-portrait I'm going to be using the Sony imaging app on my phone so that I can easily compose and take the shot away from the camera. So as you've probably seen me do in previous videos I'm also putting my mobile phone inside a double sealed bag that's just so I don't get flour all caked inside it which would be bad news. OK, I think we're ready to try this out. So I'm guessing there's no real graceful way to do this? Ah, it's cold! So I'm probably gonna stick self-timer on for about 5 seconds just to give me a bit of time to put the phone down compose me and then I'm gonna twist my head just as the shot fires and I'm hoping that will be enough to fling the flour everywhere. That looks sick! Wow! That's the first the time I've ever taken a photo like that and it looks great on the first shot. Right, more flour on my head. Look at me mum, I'm taking my clothes off on the internet and putting flour on my head. I've truly made it in this world. More flour! MORE FLOUR! I am the moon. A little bit more flour, please! Oh lovely. Ahhhhh! Beautiful pizza! [Switches camera to Continuous Shutter] That might work. Oh God, oh God, oh God! The neighbours are going to think I'm having a rave. Stop, please! Oh my God there's flour everywhere. Why hello there! Just me dropping in to say that if you're enjoying this video please don't forget to like it and subscribe to the channel because I release new videos like this every single week. OK back to the video. Oh sorry, you caught me just dreaming out the window. So setup number 2 is dead simple. As you can see I'm just sat in front of a window and we're getting some nice soft window light coming in. And then the secret really is that we've got something attached to the lens and that is a plastic bag of all things. All I've done is I've cut a hole in the bottom of the bag and I've attached it to the front of the lens using an elastic band and then I've raided my daughter's arts and craft supplies and I've got some coloured pens and I've just coloured in some of the front of the bag. Cool, so using the app I can kind of see where I'm focusing I'm going to opt to use manual focus just because I don't entirely trust the AF to lock on focus onto my eyes. Sometimes it goes onto the tip of my nose for some the reason even with face detect it's really odd. So this is probably not going to help things either so I'm just going to use manual focus for now. [SNEEZES VIOLENTLY] Still got flour up to my nose. If my neighbours can see me now they'll be like "Look at that scumbag! All of us out here struggling and this guy's just sat looking out the window!" Actually, I'm working. Cool! I think we've got it. My third and final the idea of the day involves using some reflections. Now rather than just using any old piece of glass, I've managed to create this razor-sharp a dangerous piece of glass that I'm gonna hold next to my face - what could go wrong? So the way I created this is I found an old mirror I simply scored on the back the shape that I wanted to create so in this case I wanted to make a bit of a triangle shape. I then carefully put the mirror inside a lock seal bag - one of my favourites as you can tell, I've used it 3 times today - and then I carefully took it outside and tapped it on the ground and hey presto! It completely didn't work. It broke in half, which was great. So plan B was to just keep smashing the mirror gently to see if I could get a shape and eventually, I ended up with a shard that was a decent enough shape that I could use. So that's how we've ended up with this little sucker. Obviously there are a lot of things going on in this shot. I've got to make sure I can see the camera through the glass and then I've also got to make sure the focus is right because autofocus just isn't going to help me here - I'm going to have to manually focus. So in order to help, I've paired my smartphone with my camera and I've just lent it on the windowsill so I can see the shots whilst I'm shooting. I'm also close enough to my camera that I can manually focus and I can also take the shot using the shutter button, rather than using my phone and reaching over which would just not work. So here it goes. I kind of want my face to be in the frame filling up one third. Somewhere around about there looks good. Then I'm going to hold as still as I can and then use the manual focus. So when I'm manually focusing on this camera the app rather handily zooms in so I can get critical focus which is a really helpful feature and then I can use the D-pad on the back of the camera to move that point around so that I can see what I'm doing. Right, so now to get the shot I'm looking into the mirror - fumbling around trying to find the shutter button. Found it. Cool, we're done! So I've taken some time to sort through all of the shots that I've taken today and I've edited up just a few favourites in Lightroom to show you now, so let's go ahead and take a look. So first up is the flower shoot that I shot first thing this morning. As you can probably tell from the the footage you saw earlier I had lots of fun on this shoot. I had hundreds of shots to choose from and it really was hard to narrow it down to just the final few that I could take to edit. But anyway here are some of my favourites. I'm really happy with how they've come out considering that I was just sat on my living room floor with no fancy studio backdrops or anything like that. I think they've come out looking pretty cool! But do let me know what you think about them in the comments below. OK next up is a shot I took with the plastic bag over the front of the lens. When I first got these photos into Lightroom I was really impressed with how well it worked. On the back of the camera the colours looked a little bit muted but once I started to boost the saturation in post-production the shots really came to life. I could definitely see myself using this technique in the future for commercial shoots and other fun shoots just to give the shots that kind of retro-y feel. Finally, we have the shot I took using that broken mirror. Although this shot took a little bit of patience to get right I'm really glad that I persevered onto the end and got this final shot because I think it looks really striking. if I was to do this again in the future I'd probably experiment with a different background - maybe take the shoot outdoors where we've got nice even light and some nice greenery to go in the background or something like that. But considering I restricted myself to only shooting indoors today I'm really happy with the result. Before I go I just want to give a shout out to some of the submissions that you guys have given to me on my Facebook page from last week's video. You guys really seem to love the shower the idea which is cool and you've been posting your own work on my Facebook the page which is awesome so please keep your submissions coming. So here are two of my favourites. The first was taken by Karin Schotte. I'm really sorry if I've butchered the pronunciation of your name there but she admitted that she's not really a portrait photographer as she prefers to take photos of animals but I think she's done a really good job here. The second shot is by Claudia Hoag. I really love how she's put her own spin on this by tilting her head upwards into the water and also by making the shower head a part of the scene which is really cool so good job there. As always if you decide to try out any of these ideas that I show you on the the channel then please don't forget to Share them with us on Facebook and on Instagram as we'd love to feature them in upcoming videos. Cool so that wraps everything up for this week guys. Thank you so much for watching as always and I'll see you again next week.
just to give me a bit of time to put the phone down compose me and then I'm gonna twist my head just as the shot fires and I'm hoping that will be enough to fling the flour everywhere. That looks sick! Wow! That's the first the time I've ever taken a photo like that and it looks great on the first shot. Right, more flour on my head. Look at me mum, I'm taking my clothes off on the internet and putting flour on my head. I've truly made it in this world. More flour! MORE FLOUR! I am the moon.A little bit more flour, please! Oh lovely. Ahhhhh! Beautiful pizza! [Switches camera to Continuous Shutter] That might work. Oh God, oh God, oh God! The neighbours are going to think I'm having a rave. Stop, please! Oh my God there's flour everywhere. Why hello there! Just me dropping in to say that if you're enjoying this video please don't forget to like it and subscribe to the channel because I release new videos like this every single week. OK back to the video. Oh sorry, you caught me just dreaming out the window. So setup number 2 is dead simple. As you can see I'm just sat in front of a window and we're getting some nice soft window light coming in. And then the secret really is that we've got something attached to the lens and that is a plastic bag of all things. All I've done is I've cut a hole in the bottom of the bag and I've attached it to the front of the lens using an elastic band and then I've raided my daughter's arts and craft supplies and I've got some coloured pens and I've just coloured in some of the front of the bag. Cool, so using the app I can kind of see where I'm focusing I'm going to opt to use manual focus just because I don't entirely trust the AF to lock on focus onto my eyes. Sometimes it goes onto the tip of my nose for some the reason even with face detect it's really odd. So this is probably not going to help things either so I'm just going to use manual focus for now. [SNEEZES VIOLENTLY] Still got flour up to my nose. If my neighbours can see me now they'll be like "Look at that scumbag! All of us out here struggling and this guy's just sat looking out the window!" Actually, I'm working. Cool! I think we've got it. My third and final the idea of the day involves using some reflections. Now rather than just using any old piece of glass, I've managed to create this razor-sharp a dangerous piece of glass that I'm gonna hold next to my face - what could go wrong? So the way I created this is I found an old mirror I simply scored on the back the shape that I wanted to create so in this case I wanted to make a bit of a triangle shape. I then carefully put the mirror inside a lock seal bag - one of my favourites as you can tell, I've used it 3 times today - and then I carefully took it outside and tapped it on the ground and hey presto! It completely didn't work. It broke in half, which was great. So plan B was to just keep smashing the mirror gently to see if I could get a shape and eventually, I ended up with a shard that was a decent enough shape that I could use. So that's how we've ended up with this little sucker. Obviously there are a lot of things going on in this shot. I've got to make sure I can see the camera through the glass and then I've also got to make sure the focus is right because autofocus just isn't going to help me here - I'm going to have to manually focus. So in order to help, I've paired my smartphone with my camera and I've just lent it on the windowsill so I can see the shots whilst I'm shooting. I'm also close enough to my camera that I can manually focus and I can also take the shot using the shutter button, rather than using my phone and reaching over which would just not work. So here it goes. I kind of want my face to be in the frame filling up one third. Somewhere around about there looks good. Then I'm going to hold as still as I can and then use the manual focus. So when I'm manually focusing on this camera the app rather handily zooms in so I can get critical focus which is a really helpful feature and then I can use the D-pad on the back of the camera to move that point around so that I can see what I'm doing. Right, so now to get the shot I'm looking into the mirror - fumbling around trying to find the shutter button. Found it. Cool, we're done! So I've taken some time to sort through all of the shots that I've taken today and I've edited up just a few favourites in Lightroom to show you now, so let's go ahead and take a look. So first up is the flower shoot that I shot first thing this morning. As you can probably tell from the the footage you saw earlier I had lots of fun on this shoot. I had hundreds of shots to choose from and it really was hard to narrow it down to just the final few that I could take to edit. But anyway here are some of my favourites. I'm really happy with how they've come out considering that I was just sat on my living room floor with no fancy studio backdrops or anything like that. I think they've come out looking pretty cool! But do let me know what you think about them in the comments below. OK next up is a shot I took with the plastic bag over the front of the lens. When I first got these photos into Lightroom I was really impressed with how well it worked. On the back of the camera the colours looked a little bit muted but once I started to boost the saturation in post-production the shots really came to life. I could definitely see myself using this technique in the future for commercial shoots and other fun shoots just to give the shots that kind of retro-y feel. Finally, we have the shot I took using that broken mirror. Although this shot took a little bit of patience to get right I'm really glad that I persevered onto the end and got this final shot because I think it looks really striking. if I was to do this again in the future I'd probably experiment with a different background - maybe take the shoot outdoors where we've got nice even light and some nice greenery to go in the background or something like that. But considering I restricted myself to only shooting indoors today I'm really happy with the result. Before I go I just want to give a shout out to some of the submissions that you guys have given to me on my Facebook page from last week's video. You guys really seem to love the shower the idea which is cool and you've been posting your own work on my Facebook the page which is awesome so please keep your submissions coming. So here are two of my favourites. The first was taken by Karin Schotte. I'm really sorry if I've butchered the pronunciation of your name there but she admitted that she's not really a portrait photographer as she prefers to take photos of animals but I think she's done a really good job here. The second shot is by Claudia Hoag. I really love how she's put her own spin on this by tilting her head upwards into the water and also by making the shower head a part of the scene which is really cool so good job there. As always if you decide to try out any of these ideas that I show you on the the channel then please don't forget to Share them with us on Facebook and on Instagram as we'd love to feature them in upcoming videos. Cool so that wraps everything up for this week guys. Thank you so much for watching as always and I'll see you again next week.
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