The theme for 52Frames this week was “Soft“, with an extra credit for “High-key”. Since I can’t remember doing much high-key photography, and probably roughly 0 high-key portraits, that was a nice occasion to experiment.

I kind of knew I wanted to do that today, so I did wash my hair this morning so that they’d be lighter and more fluffy/electric if I brushed them just before I took the pictures – which I did. Definitely playing the long con here.

Anyway, this afternoon I setup my tripod, my camera, my lights, the diffusers for the lights, my remote, and I took a few self-portraits. Or, you know, casual quick selfies 😉

I normally expose to the left of what I actually want, which means that for this one I exposed center 😉 That’s my original picture, with the same crop as the final one, for comparison:

The processing was pretty fast because I also knew what I wanted to do there – both in terms of exposure and colors, and in terms of softness. I played with the corresponding Darktable modules (mostly filmic rgb, soften, local contrast, color zones to decrease the read component, white balance) until I got a result I was happy with.

All in all, from “start of setup” until “picture processed and everything back in its place”, this was a fairly short endeavour – an hour and a half, roughly. It was made easier by the fact that the “photography” side of it was actually fairly limited: once the lights were setup and I was happy with the camera framing, I did a single sequence of shots, and I didn’t have to go back to the camera once that first sequence was taken – the first results were “good enough” as they were.