taken in my studio with Bowens strobes, softbox 140x100cm in front, white umbrella behind to light the tattoo, strobe with barndoors on the floor for the background.
pp, taken in RAW, color corrected, opened in PS, levels, curves, selective color, turend B/W with saturation, small spots cloned from mirror and the top of my knee cloned out, just small spots, dodge on the tattoo, burn on the background.
took about 1 hour to get the image I wanted since I had no help framing and focusing the camera,
took a whole can of shavingcream, had to lather up for each shot.
no cuts even though the knife is sharp enough to shave with :)
and ofcource the tattoos are my own design :)
Statistics
Place: 54 out of 236 Avg (all users): 6.3582 Avg (commenters): 7.1818 Avg (participants): 6.1908 Avg (non-participants): 6.5033 Views since voting: 2011 Views during voting: 542 Votes: 282 Comments: 30 Favorites: 0
Well done and great score. I liek tyhe black and white treatment on this althoug the left side seems a bit too bright. Great focus on both of you. I would have liked to have seen either a slightly different angle on you or the knife to see more detail in the knife as it is kind of hiding in both places. A closer crop on the left would have gotten rid of some of the bright empty space without negatively affecting the shot over all I think. Overall though - a great idea and well executed.
Camera Work/Technical: Crisp focus and a pretty nice tonal range. Great depth of field, keeping both you and your reflection in focus.
Lighting: The lighting is a definite strength in this capture, but it is just a bit too harsh for my taste. The area behind the mirror is so bright that it really competes for attention.
Composition/Content: Great idea, terrific composition, and very well executed.
My Opinion: I think that you captured a very interesting and very creative self portrait. With the lighting toned down a bit, this one probably would have done even better.
I really like the cleanness of the composition, with the white background, and the clarity/sharpness in both the reflection and the foreground figure. I like how the position and shape of the mirror means that there's almost 2 facets of "you" visible - with attention drawn to the tattoo in the f/g, and then the view of your face in the mirror to give you an identity.
Lighting is very good, no harsh shadows but everything softly lit really well. To be honest, I completely missed the knife to start with, but its a good element.
The only thing I'd suggest if you were reshooting is possibly to try and get the mirror straighter - because the background is plain white, you don;t have a wall to give context to the perspective, which is a bit weird. Other than that, really nice crisp shot, good score, well done.
Trading post...
Wow, nice tattoo! This is a great image. I like the sharpness and lighting. I'm not too crazy about the all white background though. It kind of seems that you and your mirror are floating in space.
Trading Post comment
This is a very clean, crisp, well-executed shot, but moreso it's a very good portrait. The choice to highlight the tattoos and use a knife rather than a conventional shaving device seems designed to tell a lot about the subject. The catchlight on the single reflected eye is perfect. Lighting overall is perfect for this shot, especially how you managed to keep the background in the reflection dark. All in all, an excellent self-portrait and though it scored well, I think it should have scored higher.
This shot scored a 6 with me. I liked the mirror (although I would have liked it to have been a bit wider) view and the clarity of the image. I wasn't wild about the white space...although it was pulled off well enough. It could easily have scored higher with me, except that I liked other images better and they got 7s. Just a viseral thing, I think. (Nice tatoo)
Nice ink. Dare I ask what happened to your other ear?
Cool shot...nice job using a white background (which removes all distractions that are usually in mirror shots)
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