Another Self-Portrait Fail

[RxForB3]

I tried another self-portrait, but I feel that I failed again. I don't like the pose in this one, plus I feel the color is off in some way, but I can't pinpoint it. I tried to recover the highlights on my face, but that seemed to bring out the odd color. Almost like it was giving me a bad fake tan... Suggestions?


IMG_1992 by RxForB3, on Flickr

 

[thetrue]

I think if you had a fill flash to camera left it would have evened out the color. Your shirt is too dark for the shadowy trees directly behind you too. Would be an awesome photo if there wasn't some guy in the way though hehe

 

[RxForB3]

Heh, well you would enjoy my post in the General Gallery, then. It's titled North Cascades Highway. Thanks for the suggestions! I guess I'm beginning to learn how planning ahead is much more important with portraits than landscapes. And the importance of fill light (either a flash or a reflector or something) for outdoor portraits...

 

[thetrue]

I've recently started really learning about the importance of flash with portraits even with good natural light. For landscapes, you can't really do much more than what's available, but that's what long exposures are for

 

[manaheim]

Posing yourself is really hard. I had an idea next time that I might try to bring a mirror with me and stick it in front of the camera so I can see what I look like while posing.

 

[KenC]

I don't usually do portraits, so take this with more than the usual number of grains of salt. First, you need to try this when the light is better. The left side of your face is too bright, and decreasing exposure would lose a lot of detail in the background. You could dual-process the raw file to reduce this problem, but it still would come out better at a different time of day or with partial cloud cover. The other thing that strikes me is that the way you are cropped seems awkward to me. I think the standard portrait formats (face, head and shoulders, waist-up and full body) are the usual ones for a reason, which is that others tend to look awkward. As I said, I don't do portraits, so I may be way off on this, but it seems that way to me.