20061015220308_anger_management.jpg
Anger Management
Questions, Comments, Criticisms october 17, 2006

Self Portrait 2006

I was playing around with lighting setups in my study; just experimenting. The camera was on a tripod, I lit the mirror with an adjustable table lamp, and I used an old Sunpak flash diffused with a piece of plastic to light my face. The flash was on the camera which was slightly in front and to the left of me. The background is just a white piece of drawing board.

The results were uninspiring until I pulled the image into Adobe Lightroom and started playing with the processing. The most dramatic change was dropping the white balance way down to give everything a bluish cast. I also cropped the image to 8 x 10 and adjusted the composition a bit; the mirror was a little more central originally. Final processing in Photoshop was my standard bit of Unsharp Mask, and some Gaussian Blur to soften the background.

I started out with this title, went through about half-a-dozen others, and finally came back to the original. The image is more about the inability to express emotion than anger per se. Even the processing choices I made imply the suppression of anger; dropping the white balance shifted the background from the warm red/yellow of the tungsten lighting from the lamp into a cold blue/magenta. Only a couple of red highlights are left. The composition of my face in the mirror, as well as the position of the mirror in the frame, increase the isolation the subject.

I hope this doesn't sound too pretentious. I'm just trying to explain what was going through my head as I was working on this image. I'm trying to think more about what I'm doing throughout the entire process, from setting up the shot to final processing. I'd love to hear your opinions, so feel free to click on the Questions, Comments, Criticisms link in the top right corner of this box and tell me what you're thinking.