Photography

Lollipop self-portrait

Posted on April 20, 2011

24-70mm, 43mm,1/40 at f/3.5, ISO 100 + one TD5 Spiderlite, bare 24×32″ softbox.

Wanted to do something fashiony, and having no models at 3am last night I had to volunteer.

Photographing yourself is a nightmare. I see all these amazing self-portraits on Flickr and have no idea how these people do it.

To get in the right position, I turned on live view and held a small mirror behind the camera. Then, I switched back to camera view and used a shutter release to take the shot. Getting focus on the right spot was ridiculously hard. I pressed the shutter release button half-way to get focus, but I couldn’t tell what the camera was focusing on. I have about 90 shots that focused on my nose and not the lollipop :P Ahh well, maybe it’s just a matter of patience and practice.

The original pict wasn’t very special and pretty flat because I was lazy and only used one light & didn’t put any make up on :P so I added a pink fill layer in PS and some gradient lens flares across the photo.

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Lisa Bettany is a world renowned photographer, travel writer & tech entrepreneur. When she is not capturing the beauty of the world or making iPhone apps, she enjoys flying small planes, reading books about Spitfires, hiking in the mountains and drinking tea.

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  • John
    April 20, 2011 at 2:44 PM

    Hi Lisa!

    I like your style of this portrait, for me it is interesting you were “aiming” for that lollipop. Will you make portraits of other parts of your head? I think it might be a great series of photos :)

    I also tried making a self portrait and followed up directions given by Mark Wallace in Adorama TV. Here you can check my blog with self portrait and on the same page you’ll find also the video I was talking about ;)

    And believe me, success is 100 % guaranteed, it just took me 6 shots to get that photo :)

  • Kenneth Roszkowski
    April 20, 2011 at 5:23 PM

    Beautiful photo Lisa, and I love the post processing you did. For focusing issues while shooting self portraits try this… Switch to manual focus and put something (a light stand for example) as a placeholder for where you will be and focus on that. Then when you move the placeholder and stand in front of the camera, snap away with your remote and simply vary your distance from the camera a few inches for each shot by leaning in and out a little. You still need to take a bunch of shots and pick the best, but you don’t have to keep fiddling with the camera between shots that way.

  • s h e r r y
    April 21, 2011 at 10:10 PM

    Ooh. So cool. I’m often dissuaded from self-portraits for the same focusing issues. I usually just take a BUNCH and hope they come out :)

  • Lisa
    April 22, 2011 at 2:44 PM

    Really nice picture Lisa! I love the processing you’ve done to it too. Self portraits are very difficult to do especially the ones where you’re just trying to focus on a particular part of your body.

  • Lennart
    May 13, 2011 at 2:39 AM

    Hey Lisa,

    How about using the Canon Utilities Software? You can put a live View Signal onto your laptop and zoom in +5 +10. Bring in focus shouldnd Be a Problem anymore!

  • Sro
    May 25, 2011 at 9:36 AM

    There are some free tethered shooting software out there.

  • hippopath
    June 1, 2011 at 11:58 PM

    Hi, great photography…please consider the message your photos convey. I would love to introduce my kids who are 9 and 11 to your work however stuff like this photo show up. Going through the checkout line with all the magazines is hard enough. Be unique and consider the message…I know you probably do.

    Don’t get me wrong. Your work is great. Just want to share it with those I love.