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For Challenge #9, Self-Portrait, we were challenged to create any kind of self-portrait with no restrictions on anything other than it being a self-portrait. Now for me, I didn't care about the "meaning" of the self-portrait. In other words, I didn't care if people looked at my self-portrait and thought, "This is how he sees himself". What I wanted to do was create a shot of myself that would have meaning in itself, independent of whether or not it was considered a self-portrait or not. Seeing what other people were submitting, lots of portraits, lots of shots in a mirror, etc., I wanted to do something completely different.
OK, how did I create this shot? First of all, I had a specific mood and effect in my mind of what I wanted to do. The idea for this shot was based on a very moving National Geographic photo of a chimp in captivity. It inspired me to create a similar shot, but with much more texture and color. The only way I could have done this was with digital photography. I could have theoretically burned up a bunch of shots and picked the right ones on film, scanned them and then edited them in PS, but it would have taken much longer and wouldn't have been as good. Because I could preview what I had captured with my camera, I could change exposure, lighting, aperture, everything with very little effort. I used a Nikon D100 and Photoshop CS to edit them. I could have also used PS 7.0 but I was trying out CS.
I took a shot of my face concentrating on my eye using my Nikkor 70-300 f/4-5.6D ED. I chose this lens because it has the largest reproduction ratio of all the lenses I own. I think it is something like 1:3.9. Then I shot the interior of my oven which served as the base for the "cage" door. This shot was difficult to take because the inside of the oven is black, and it is hard to expose correctly. I had to light the edge of the door and bounce the light inside. Also, logistically, the door was in the way of my tripod. So that was an additional hassle. I used a Nikkor 24-85 f/3.5-4.5G AF-S to shoot this. I exposed both shots with a small enough aperture opening to make sure and get as much in focus as possible. I rotated and cropped the oven image to include the best of the texture and to cut out the lighting. Then I used the transform tool to make the image appear more "head on" instead of being angled the way it was originally captured.
I wanted the cage to look like a hole was cut in it with a blowtorch and then it was painted long ago. So I used Photoshop to cut a hole in the oven texture, and used various brushes to draw in the scratches along the edge of that cut. Some brushes were shaped like paint chips to make it appear as if rust was flaking the paint off in chips. I wanted to make it look like the bottom of the hole was more worn than the top of the hole (because that would be true in reality). Food would go through there and I might hang my fingers through it. So it would be smoother and with less paint than the sharp top and sides would. I used a brush to create some additional horizontal scrapes on a separate layer, which I then changed the layer properties of to best blend into the cage. These might be the scrapes that occur when the door is moved (like a pocket door). Using image > edit > variations, I tried out different versions of brown and green for the cage, deciding on a mix of the two for the midtones, mainly green for the highlights and brown for the shadows. The original shot of the oven texture was already warm, and I could have changed this to have blue tones which would have made a great "cold" feel to the whole image. But I had in mind that I wanted to juxtapose the warm hopeful light with the stark conditions. Like happiness was just outside the door and I could just see it with my eye. So that is why I tried to stick to warmer tones like earth tones of evergreen and brown, instead of cold tones of blue and pale green.
I then placed the first photo of my eye on a layer beneath the cage layers so the eye showed through the hole. Took me some time to decide on the best position of the eye. I ended up rotating the eye about 4 degrees CCW using the edit > transform > rotate function. I changed the contrast and brightness using an adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast) so I could go back and change what I had done. Then I emphasized the shapes and wrinkles and pores in my face using the burn and dodge tools. Helped give me a deformed look. I then used the dodge tool to create the beam of light across the cage. I made sure to add additional highlights on the lower left edge of the cut in the cage, and shadows on the upper right. Also, I did my best to have the light beam widen at the bottom, as a beam of light would in some instances. I matched the angle and pattern of light across my face on the face layer making sure to highlight parts of my eyelid and adding shadow to other parts, depending on the shape of the lid and the shape of my eye and eyebrow. I made sure to have the space to the right of my eye be in shadow because the angle the light was coming in at, the door would be blocking it from hitting my face. Finally, I put the whole thing inside a polaroid frame and colored parts of the frame for some effect. I also added my copyright.
Overall, I had to work with what I already had in the original photos. I couldn't draw anything in, I could only emphasize and add to what was already contained and hidden within the commonly ignored portions of the photos. People would never see those pores and wrinkles in my skin unless I burned them in. But I didn't draw any of them. They were all there to begin with. The light beam was used to add some "realism" to the oven texture and to emphasize the whole point of the image (hope outside the cage). But I didn't just draw a line with the dodge tool to create this effect. I made sure to pay attention to how the light would actually highlight different parts of the textures, emphasizing the three-dimensionality of the cage and my face. Also, whenever light hits your skin, it often bounces off onto whatever is in front of you. So I tried to simulate this effect with the redness on the skin. The idea was that as light bounced off the eye onto the inside of the cage, it would reflect back onto the cheek. I chose red because for some reason, I imagined the inside of the cage as being painted red. Don't know why but it just seemed right at the time.
You might think that this image took me all week to create, but honestly, it only took about an hour to create. Most of the time was spent making decisions about what colors worked best with the idea I had in my head. Photoshop is such a powerful tool that if you have in mind what you want to create, and you know where all the tools are, it doesn't take that long to make dramatic changes. You just have to be careful because it is very easy to create something that looks very fake or Photosloppy. Again, I made sure to under-do it, rather than overdo it. At one point, I really liked the way it was looking, so I stopped. I knew that if I added any more, it would start to look really fake. So some restraint was required.
Thanks to everyone for your votes and praises! I'm glad this shot has gotten so much feedback. I hope that this article will inspire others to try similar things and show that Photoshop can be used to create images that are otherwise impossible or very difficult to take with a camera alone.
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