365days finale
Some of you may remember this time last year I started a rather narcissistic awesome project to take a self portrait every day for a year. Welll, I’ve finally completed it! No missed days or anything. Yey.
If you’ve been following it on flickr, then you’ll have seen my final pic. If not, here it is…
It looks kinda easy, but it wasn’t!…
Canon 580EX Speedlight
My main new toy that helped me with this is a Canon 580EX Speedlight. It’s basically like a camera’s flash. But not attached to the camera. And thanks to some eBay magic devices, I can put the flash anywhere and fire it from anywhere with a handy little remote control. I’ll cover my flash kit in a seperate entry soon 
I set the camera up on BULB mode, which means I can open and close the shutter whenever I want (via another handy remote). This meant I could take my time to do what I needed to do. The exposures here are about 60 seconds long - give or take a few.
Teh failz!
Yep, I don’t get things right the first time…
On some I messed up the writing. On some I was overly lit up. And on some I was ghostly. I briefly touched upon the light writing element a while ago so shalln’t go over that again. Today I’ll try and explain how I look so solid and non-ghoslty
Mosaic - pic 1
The first shot in the little mosaic was a test shot. As you can see, I’m solid, but rather over-exposed - this was because I had my flash on full power. I suppose I could’ve set a smaller aperture on my camera to compensate, but didn’t.
Mosaic - pics 2 & 3
Picture two and three are bad though. The flash was OK - I adjusted it down to half power.
The burst of flash illuminates the subject enough so it doesn’t blur during movement. And because it’s so dark when the flash isn’t on, any additional movement isn’t picked up (ie during the writing).
But the technique requires a totally black background otherwise ghostly effects occur. Why? Well, going back to camera basics here - camera sensors (and old skool films) record light. If there is light behind the subject, then it will penetrate through during the rest of the long exposure (=ghosts). If there’s no light, it won’t (=solid)
Why was there light behind me sometimes? Well, I was in an underpass and cars kept driving by. With stupid headlights on. Uh.
Mosaic - pic 4
Four is great, but I was looking the wrong way. Bum.
I nailed it on the fifth go
Experiment
As with most things like this - it’s always worth experimenting. It’s great to learn stuff, and fun! Probably not on a freezing cold night though. Brrr!
Dude, I went through and looked at your photos on flickr, one word… SWEET! you have a real talent with the camera, and I’m glad you showed the out takes for your 365 finale! It shows its not as easy as it looks.