Came up with this self-portrait concept a while back and only just got round to trying it. Very difficult to focus on an eye and keep your subject still while positioning yourself and some light to be the only lightsource falling on her eye. In the end i used a single flash held just off to the side of the model, slightly forward from her face to stop any stray light falling on her from the flash directly - using myself as a reflector/umbrella substitute. This means i had to fire a rather high-powered flash at myself from about 6 inches away, which is why i\'m looking off to the left - to avoid burning out my retinas. A human eyeball isn\'t perfectly round, so you get some interesting distortion in the reflection. Also very hard to focus on a reflected object in an eye - and doubly so when you ARE that object, so you can\'t check the viewfinder.
One other problem is that all the light reflected is therefore no longer sunlight-balanced white, but an odd tungsten-ish skin colour (being entirely reflected off my face onto the model\'s eye). This calls for some odd hue adjustment to make it look natural.
Setup: 100-400L IS at 360mm with 67mm of extension tubes on a tripod, pre-focused on the eye (about 5 feet away), wirelessly triggered slave flash next to model\'s head pointing at me, mirror lockup and remote release.
Editing: crop, contrast, brightness, selective partial desaturation of the red channel everywhere except the iris and reflection, some minor cloning of dust in the eyelashes, resize, sharpen.
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the lashes look unreal, but the reflection is impressive. compositionally I would have liked to have the reflected face looking into the pupil, rather than off to the left and out of the eye.
I really love eye shots and this one is really nice...my only neg is the distortion on the reflection person's face leaves them with a really unflattering look...amazing lashes...bumping up to 8
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