Hey everyone I'm a new guy around here. I saw this forum area and thought I would share my latest self portrait. I never do much editing in Photoshop. All editing is done in Camera RAW. So basically it stuff you can do with film but digitally. Hope you like it! Link to Flikr Page http://www.flickr.com/photos/webarmy/5184601569/
I like this. Is it you though? Or who you want to be? People always give themselves a serious demeanour when posing for self portraits. I wonder how much of you is really in there. I'd question the angle though. The serious look, but high viewpoint are at odds for me. Looking down at someone always gives an impression of passiveness, yet the expression is one of seriousness. The end result for me is one of angst and frustration.. someone trapped. Was that your intention? I'd also question whether anything you can do in Camera Raw is what you can do with film. You can do MUCH more in Camera Raw than you could do with film. Exposure correction (within reason), white balance, levels and curves, sharpening, detail enhancement, individual colour tuning, highlight recovery, saturation, clarity adjustments, lens/aberration correction, geometric distortion correction... none of these things you can do working purely with film. I'm not sure the noise is working. To me digitally added noise looks like just that... I've yet to see a convincing film grain look in a digital image. Or was this shot with a high ISO? Same result either way.
Although easier to do it all digitally. You can do all of these with film to at least some degree. Through the careful selection of film and paper stock, correct emulsion and paper processing techniques and printing by hand with the right gear and lens. (Techniques even exist for sharpening, detail enhancement and handling such things as chromatic aberration). Exposure correction = Push pull film processing / Adjust printing exposure shot by shot White balance = Correct film or paper selection / Filtered results when printing Highlight recovery = Adjusted processing /Dodging etc But it's a hell of a lot quicker, easier and a lot more successful to do it digitally! No argument there.
Like you say.. to a degree. yes, you can select contrast by choosing paper emulsion, or multigrade filter (although contrast management is WAY harder with traditional colour printing), it is not the same as making a curves adjustment, as localised manipulation of the curve histogram is not really possible. You could dodge and burn using various multigrade filters (I've done this in the past), but the results are not comparable. There is no practical way to correct chromatic aberrations in traditional colour printing. Theoretically, you could print with a lens of equal, but opposite characteristics to correct chroma shift, but you could never recover the sharpness. High acutance developers can be used to increased perceived edge sharpness, but in reality, have little effect compared to the level of control you have with a RAW file. Push/pull processing has other adverse effects, and is not a linear correction of exposure. Increase in contrast, loss of highlight and shadow detail, grain clumping... all adversely effect the image, whereas adjusting exposure with a RAW file is essentially a fairly linear change across the whole curve. You could compensate with a higher, or lower grade paper, but again, the effects are more pronounces. Also, you can not really effect the same level of change with traditional RA4 printing as you can with mono printing. yes, you can do stuff to recover highlight detail... although dodging wouldn't help... remember it's a negative... to recover highlights, you'd be BURNING. Having said this, a more effective method would be a mixture of burning and paper pre-flashing. It's still pants compared to the amount you can rescue highlights at the RAW stage. There are parallels obviously, as most of these digital tools are replicating, and are even named after traditional dark room techniques, but to say manipulating at the RAW stage is only making the same level of adjustments one could previously do in a wet dark room is a gross exaggeration
To answer your question everything was intentional in the photo. My inspiration is from the love of the zombie apocalypse theme in games and movies. A lot of real life people find me intimidating at first meet so the rugged look comes from that. The looking up and high angle shot is for a dramatic effect to show both the willingness to tough out the next wave and the feeling of hopelessness. Much like a man with nothing to lose is about to go into insurmountable odds, yes he is brave (or crazy enough) enough to go in but deep inside has the fear that every other man in the battle has. My dial is broken on my camera that controls AF and Exposure levels so I have to resort to lighting techniques and the such. In fact this shot was taken inside my apartment around noon time. I love experimenting with lighting and such as it's the very best way to create the mood you want to present across. I do a lot of black and white photos also. When I say I don't edit a picture in Photoshop and only in Camera RAW I mean I don't touch anything up. No removing of hairs and etc. I like all of my photos to be natural. I would rather take the time to get the lighting perfect and make up and such first than edit it in Photoshop even though I have the abundant skills to do so. All of my self shots are done purely by me. I set up the focus, the lighting and put the camera on a 10 sec timer (thankfully I can still do that). I have a lot of fun with this as it's a much bigger challenge to me to shoot myself rather than someone else. EDIT: I also agree that Camera RAW has much more functionality and ease of use compared to film. but I kind of explained my reason for saying that up above.
