My first post!

See more at My Flickr Photostream

For my first post I thought I would start with my most recent piece of work, a self portrait, which I titled "...and then..." because it almost looks like I'm telling a story, maybe about a bird flying over and taking a crap on my head.  I took this photo with a on old 135mm Rexatar lense, mounted to my Canon Xsi (450D) with an M42 adapter.  I also used a 530EX Speedlite mounted onto the camera and a Gary Fong lightsphere.  The camera was on a tripod and triggered with a wireless remote.

First, why do I like this photo?  I like the black and white post processing and the sharpness.  I wasn't too happy with the exposure straight out of camera so I bumped it up a couple of stops and increased the contrast.  I'm against a wall in by bedroom and I like the shadow created.  I also like how my arm and head frame the negative space.  I was using a wireless remote in my right hand, just firing away and out of 30-something pictures this is the only one that I thought was the most decent (and even this one is crappy).

What do I not like?  What is my hand doing and where are my eyes?  It just looks awkward.  I think I was actually reaching up to fix my hair as my other hand pressed the trigger.  If it was more deliberate and there was tension in my hand and an expression in my eyes there might have been a story on the photo.  Under my arm in the far left is a distracting element - I'm sitting right next to a wall mounted mirror.  I should have cloned that frame out.

I bought this lens about a year ago for $30 in a small photography store.  The Rexatar is a challenge because it has to be focused manually.  And because my camera has a cropped sensor I have to set the camera way back just to get my head and shoulders into the frame.  Also when you view the LCD in live view the exposure is not as bright as the actual photograph.  If you adjust your exposure so it looks right in live view the actual photo you take is extremely overexposed.  Everything about this lens is manual and, because I have only played with this lens a few times and don't know it well, I found myself going back and forth every couple of shots to see how the shots are working out.  In addition to the stupid looks on my face, most of the shots were out of focus and the exposure entirely wrong.

For this particular shot I set the aperture to 8 (manually on the lens).  Larger aperture produced fuzzy pics.  My ISO was at 1600, which is noisy, but I don't mind that so much.