There’s a portrait round in the club coming up and I’ve been trying to come up with a different style of shot. I expect there will be an abundance of traditional portraits doing the rounds and I fully expect I’ll submit a few of those myself.

But I also wanted a few more unusual shots.

And after watching the Matrix a few months back, I couldn’t get the idea of a computer lit shot out of my mind. I lined a person up for the shot, but had no idea about lighting it. So rather than waste their time, last night I used myself as my test subject.

OK. It’s maybe a little 1999. But I kind of like the effect.

I started out by just lighting my face using the glow from a laptop monitor with a series of lines of bright green text on it. This just wasn’t generating enough light though and holding still for 30 seconds was a nightmare. So I settled on reducing the exposure time to around 15 seconds and firing a flash with a green gel from my right during the shot.

An overlay layer, a graduated filter and some curves later and the shot was done.

I’ll do the same shot again with the friend who’s volunteered, but I’ve learned some lessons along the way.

1. Long exposures are impossible to manage for the model.
2. It’s impossible to auto focus a Canon 400D in the dark, so you need to get the focus set and then stay still until the light goes off and the shot’s taken
3. Make sure the strobe is behind a diffuser otherwise you’ll get hot spots
4. The text on the monitor needs to be bigger to be legible (and will be reversed (duh) on the image
5. Even if you’re planning on having one side of the face dark, you need to be careful – no light means no detail. If I lift the image on the left side the ear is just a lump of noise
6. Straighter on to the monitor would have helped the text a little more