Hello everyone! I hope you are having a wonderful fall season. Summer has been very busy and I didn’t have the time to really enjoy it. I hope to slow down a bit during this new season and go out and take photos more often.
Here is a before and after of my last shoot:
I first had to expand my image to create a square and then added more background and flowers from other images I took. After that I adjusted colors.
So here I am 
, finally showing you a new image. I wanted to share some thoughts and bts images on it.
This image was partly inspired by Rosie Hardy’s recent work, especially by her framing. I had her new images in mind for some days and thought a lot about more simple portraiture. I wanted to create something different than my usual images that show a lot of surrounding nature and a whole body that sometimes nearly gets lost in my images. I have experienced that I got further away from the subject with my camera, especially since I am shooting with a fullframe sensor. Also I prefer not showing my face too close normally because I don’t consider myself being good at making interesting expressions.
With all this in mind I wanted to face my fear of showing my face so directly and using a more simple concept for a selfportrait. I had the image in my mind exactly as I walked into the woods, it felt good. I try to picture the image in my head before I start shooting a lot more lately, it makes editing so much easier because you know what you need for the final image. Shooting itself was a very interesting experience, I think I never stood so close to my camera ever . I tried to capture a rather neutral expression and leave some space for interpretation for the viewer.
Editing took me a lot more time than usual, and having stared at my face for some hours now it still feels awkward somehow. I guess I just feel vulnerable putting my face out there, not knowing if people do accept a normal looking face being spoilt by heavy retouched and perfect looking model faces. But people looking at my images must be used to my face by now so I hope no one will get frightened .
Wow that was much text (for me), thanks for reading. Enjoy a before image (not the exact picture I used for the final image and colors slightly edited) and some behind the scenes pictures and have a wonderful sunday everyone!
- Eva -
Someone asked on formspring if I could do a tutorial on how I did make “Empty inside”. I did this image over 1,5 years ago and still get lovely comments for it, thank you so much. For me, looking at my old work can be quite awkward sometimes. I didn’t even know what shooting RAW meant by this time, did not know anything about using flashes (I don’t know too much about that yet ) but I feel like I was so happy to try out new things back then. I can see that I am stuck in my comfort zone very much now and need to start trying new things again.
But now let’s have a quick look at the final image and the two original ones I used.
The important thing with this kind of images is that you shoot both images at the same angle. With editing I first used the stamp tool to remove my hair on the right side and replace it with skin. Then I cut out the bowl and placed it on my head. You may need to resize it to fit your head. Furthermore I lightened the background to make it white everywhere with a white brush and the dodge tool. Finally I did adjust the tones.
I hope that this one did help you and was interesting too. Please leave a message or twitter me if you have any further questions.
