Project 52: Week 1; Self Portrait

This is the first edition of my new weekly series; Project 52. Each week will have a different theme, this week is Self Portrait.

 Olympus OM-D EM-5, Olympus M.Zuiko 17mm 1:1.8, ISO 400, f8, 1/8th sec.

As you may or may not know I don’t tend to take that many self portrait’s, although I have posted one on here before. Rather than go for the whole tripod and flash set up I thought I’d keep it simple (in future edition’s to the series I’ll probably break those out) so I’ve used my Olympus OM-D EM-5 and a mirror.

I prefer to shoot monochrome with my Olympus so I’ve converted the raw file to black & white in Photoshop (I use the monochrome mode on this camera but that only create’s b&w JPEG’s). I’ve also reduced the highlights and light tones and increased the dark and shadow’s, mainly because that’s how I like monochrome images to look, I think it also help’s give a tiny bit of a film simulation feel to the image. As you can see the mirror is pretty dusty, I thought about cleaning it but firstly; I’m lazy, and secondly; I think the dust specks add a dimension to the photograph, again helping give it a film rather than digital look. In all I’m relatively pleased with this shot, I think it does what I wanted it to do.