The Making of #268: Overgrown
#268: Overgrown
This was not the idea I had for today's self-portrait, but it developed organically (ha!) when I decided to take a shot that reflected (ha!) the weather. You see, it's been raining/snowing/sleeting all day here. I keep finding myself at the window behind my desk, watching the stuff drip from the sky while trying to figure out just how solid it is. I noticed that my breath made the window fog up and thought "Perfect! I'll fog the window in the back door, stick my hand with camera out, and take a photo with everything foggy except my eyes!"
This was more of a shot to check exposure settings, so after I snapped this one, I quickly cleared the spots for my eyes in the window and shot this one:
This one was actually exactly what I was going for, but I snapped another one before looking at this one on the LCD. The third one is the shot that became “Overgrown.” Once I realized that the reflection of our admittedly-overgrown back fence looked so cool with my out-of-focus face superimposed on it, I tried to perfect the shot.I tried at least 100 times and never got as close to what I wanted as I did with the first accidental shot. I tried changing the settings. First I tried stopping down the aperture so that more of me would be in focus. I went from an aperture of f/1.9 for the initial shot to f/4. Oddly enough, of the f/4 shots, the camera insisted on focusing on ME and not the reflection about 80% of the time. When I changed the aperture back to f/1.9, it was much easier to make the camera focus on the reflection (I was using center-spot focus, so I would aim just to the right of my head, lock focus, and then recompose.)
Just another reminder that accidents happen, and sometimes they’re keepers :)