Glass head on a stand, black hat, dark coat collar turned up.
Used the timer on a tripod; set the exposure/focus with fairly direct incandescent light from the side, then swung the lamp around so it was facing away, and the light mainly came through perforations in the top of the brass lampshade, and from a nearby television.
I tried shining a flashlight up through the bottom, but it didn't come out as well.
Used one tone curve. Cloned out a but of the rubber band holding up the coat, and a bit of collar in a contrasting color which was sticking out awkwardly.
Made a mask for the background (based on the Red Channel) and applied a separate curve to the background, then ran the Gaussian Blur on the background at somewhere between 8-16 (can't remember) so my (previously photographed) wallpaper would be less recognizable; cloned out a few "rough edges" the quickly made mask had left.
Resized, and cropped about 20 pixels from the bottom and right so it would fit under the size limit at maximum-quality compression.
I'm expecting quite a few people to think it's over-processed, even though it's nearly straight out of the camera except for blurring the background, which my camera's limited control over DOF would not let me do photographically.
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You win the most unsual submission award. It's really hard to tell ifthis is a person or not - but at least it's not a dog like some submitted, The darkest areas are very hard to see much detail.
Hmmm ... "hard to tell" was more or less the theme of this photo.
On a side note, I just looked at the photo on my profile page ... hmmmm ...
As dark as this portrait is, it makes it difficult to make out much detail in the facial features. It also appears inhuman, whereas the challenge instructions specifically stated to create a portrait of a person. I do appreciate the uniqueness and the risk-taking you have shown.
The idea of darkness and mystery is present here. But the loss of detail in the black accessories detracts from the overall effect. Perhaps soft secondary lighting could bring up the detail.
This is a well done shot, but the choice of subject make it hard for me to evaluate against the other entries, so I scored it harshly, but, that is for the competiton only. Very good effort capturing detail in the dark areas.
You win the most unsual submission award. It's really hard to tell ifthis is a person or not - but at least it's not a dog like some submitted, The darkest areas are very hard to see much detail.
Hard to really make out what this is. The darkness does give it a mood. The highlighted areas give it some form, but still hard to make out alot of detail. (and I am on a Mac-according to forums, is lighter) (C:
You're not kidding, I can barely make out the one eye and the nose and yes, my monitor is calibrated. It's an interesting idea but the shadows and lack of light make this really hard to look at for very long for me. A 3
I think this could have fit the challenge much better had you put some light on the subjects face so that it wasn't totally in the shadows.There is deviating from the norm and then there is not meeting the objective of the challenge at all.
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