Actually, had a good idea of what to shoot, but by 2am without any successful takes, I was starting to worry that I wouldn't get it right.
AFTER VOTING:
Thank you for all your comments. I'm really happy with the way this one turned out. If I did it again, I'd ensure that the bottom-left pose added more to the image - maybe by centering it a bit more, lowering it a bit more and maybe changing the pose to face the camera directly. But after countless outtakes, I think I'd just lost the stamina to keep perfecting it...
Statistics
Place: 40 out of 170 Avg (all users): 6.1060 Avg (commenters): 7.2759 Avg (participants): 5.8904 Avg (non-participants): 6.1593 Views since voting: 1600 Views during voting: 655 Votes: 368 Comments: 35 Favorites: 0
The basic idea is quite simple. Take a long exposure in a dark room, and use flash lighting to briefly expose the subject in various poses within the frame.
Executing this idea takes quite a bit of time though.
I planned the poses by taking numerous short exposures with the lights on (remotely triggered), so that in the test shots there is only one pose per image. Then when I was happy with where I had to be standing for each pose, I did the long exposure with the lights off, by moving from position to position and triggering the flash whenever I got into the correct pose.
(Moving around in the dark can be hazardous. See my comments on this thread)
There are certain factors that make the task easier:
1. A vary dark room. Any ambient light will cause the background to shine through, and will also cause 'ghosting' of the main subject.
2. Flash lighting. The only light must be brief flashes of strong light. This is what causes sharp, bright, well defined subjects (i.e. no motion blur). I used my SB-600 speedlight, handheld, pressing the "Test" button to trigger the flash. (You can see from the angle in my shoulder in the top-left pose, that I am holding the flash pointing down at me.)
3. Focus and DOF. The three poses are at different distances (the top-right being the closest, about 3ft from the camera), so DOF becomes important. I focused in on the closest pose, and selected F11 to give quite a wide DOF. The narrower the aperture though, the less strong the effect of the flash lighting is. So F11 was a good compromise to keep the rear pose in reasonable focus, as well as allow enough light in from the flash.
The remote trigger also helps, especially whilst setting up the poses (in fact, it's probably vital for most self-portraiture).
glad you got this validated because it is amazing and makes you ask the question, how on earth did you accomplish this...deserves to do well, great job
good job creating the compisition in camera. hope your score didn't suffer too much before validation. 8 from me only because the bottome left pose seems strange. maybe it is your finger.
I quite like this, an interesting take on a portrait/self-portrait. I'll be interested to see how you did it because it looked like it was manipulated. The red showing on the collar of the lower-left portrait is a little distracting. I'm in two minds about whether the large dark space in lower right is a little too large or not - but maybe that's part of the image, staring into nothingness.
Tsk! That is nothing, I have stayed up to 4 am for DPC so beat that sucker :) Nice idea, a lot of people have a similar one but this is by far the best executed of them all I have seen so far, have voted on about 40% here.
Very effective. The bottom-left pose however takes away from the other two - just not as convincing (and the hand is a bit blown). Nonetheless, the balance across the image is excellent and the angst we all know is well conveyed.
I hate to say it, but this would have been SO much better with the bottom one gone... Nice execution though... I was thinking of doing something similar. A crop probably would have brought this up a good two notches for me...
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