On a rainy day in October

I began my self-portrait project. I had toyed with the idea of making this a weekly journal of sorts, but I just want to try to keep myself motivated. More than once a week is fantastic and let's hope I can do some of those, but a weekly entry is generally what I'm aiming for.

Here are my submissions for this week. They obviously don't have any kind of autobiographical context, other than I just felt like dolling myself up and experimenting with some lighting and post-editing work. A mixture of flash/no flash from my camera, modeling lamp/no modeling lamp and various apertures and shutter speed were my "conditions" today. I'm fairly pleased with the post work I've done, although I know the heavy-handedness of the editing isn't for everyone. My focus for technical prowess, photographically speaking, still lies in my work outside of self-portraiture. Doing this kind of stuff allows me to practice a whole range of things without wasting the time of some poor model. I can flip-flop manual camera and lighting settings and really botch these photographs in editing without feeling guilty for giving my unsuspecting model really crap images in payment for their time. So, yay for self-portraits!