«Selfie»

Since everyone is usually too busy to pose for my portraits I decided to practice on myself. I put the camera onto a tripod, switched it into an Auto Area AF and fired it with a wired remote control. The trick to make it focus on the face and not something else is to shine a flashlight into the face while focusing.

Of course it doesn’t focus onto the eye every time, so it’s a bit of trial and error process. D700 can display a point where the camera focused in the preview mode, so it’s helpful to see what point it did pick after taking a shot without having to run to the computer every time.

I lit it the usual way — SB-600 fired through an umbrella remotely triggered by a pop-up flash. Post processing is done in Photoshop CS5. The main technique here is to use a couple of screen and overlay layers.
February 2011.