Vintage film-feel Self-Portrait

[ChrisOquist]

An experiment in simulating an old-school film look here.

I had left my seamless paper down in the living room and the sunlight filtering through the windows and then through the white paper was so lovely I thought it might make a good photograph. Unfortunately, the indirect daylight through so much material was not adequate for all but the slowest shutters, so I set up two Speedlites, one in each windowsill, pointing directly up so that they would filter through open blinds and simulate sunlight, and then flash through the white paper. Another Speedlight is set up at camera right and firing through an umbrella for fill. For all that i tried the shadows alongside the mirror were still harsh - for what it's worth I was able to soften them a bit with a 22" gold/silver reflector to the right and slightly forward of the mirror.

Some digital filters, rotation, and Photoshop actions here to simulate aged film, plus an attempt at reproducing film grain. Out of 72 images I took this is the one I liked the best.

What do you think?

 

[ChrisOquist]

Wow, this must be super underwhelming..

 

[LaFoto]

Complicated set-up. And more thought (and planning and preparation) went into all this than I ever could a) contemplate and b) put into practise for lack of equipment. So, "wow" on all that!

A pity that we see so little of you at this size. At only 525px wide, with so much context, you yourself almost all disappear.

And to my mind the noise looks like noise. Not like grain...

 

[ChrisOquist]

Here's a bigger shot. Didn't know how big I could go without making this thing scroll sideways..

Thanks for the comments - I found film grain tough to duplicate - basically what I did was create a layer in Photoshop, fill it with 50% gray, add digital noise, and then run it through a Gaussian blur to make it look less sharp and noisy. Maybe there's a plugin somewhere that does it better than I can - if I find one I might redo the processing here as I really like the shot.

By the way, 29,077 posts?!?! That's amazing!

 

[eyeye]

it looks like you are talking yourself into going ahead with the mass murder you were planning for the day.

But I give you props...self ports are hard. I just spent an hour getting ready and setting everything up just to realize that I can not find my tripod and nothing else was going to work...oh and I hate being in pics....oh well.