At hope slide - a self portrait.

Self portrait at Hope Slide.
Being the one behind the camera means that there aren't a lot of shots of me.  I have hundreds of photos of my family, but relatively few of yours truly.  Every once in a while though I do a self-portrait.  I know that selfies, a relatively new term in the world of photography, tend to be all the rage with cell phones, but I did this with a full frame DSLR camera.  There is nothing really special about that, but there are some interesting facts associated with the image which I feel are worthy of putting in text.

First off, notice the great depth of field.  The flowers in the foreground and mountain in the background are all in sharp focus.  There are three reasons for this.  I was using an ultrawide 20 mm lens, shooting at f/11, and picked a focal point just behind me to maximize depth of field. 

The shutter speed was 1/160th of a second.  There is nothing special about that, but it had to be high enough to make the flowers relatively still.  The fact was it was a windy day and the flowers were bobbing to and fro with some gusto.  I normally use an ISO of 100, but at f/11 I would have a shutter speed of 1/20th of a second - far too slow for the dancing daisies before me.  So I picked an ISO of 800, not a great value for compact cameras but a full frame camera masters it wonderfully with little noise.

There is another benefit to using the ultra wide angle lens; I had to be relatively close to the camera to be a reasonable size.  The background was actually much more impressive than what is rendered in the image.  That is one of the caveats of using ultra wide lenses.  It also can be a virtue because I managed to get a good part of the mountain in the shot.    The biggest benefit though was that I could use my built in flash. 

Built in flashes are relatively weak.  Compared to that tiny LED built into cell phones it is an arc-light, but still not very powerful in reality.  At f/11 the flash would work only to about four feet.  However, with the ISO bumped up to 800 the distance was closer to 10 feet, which was fine for my needs.  The image below was taken without flash - you can clearly see the difference.  The technique of using flash when not called for to fill the foreground, even when there is enough natural light, is called fill flash.  It is a favorite technique of photographers all over the world.

I did not bring my tripod with me.  There was a multitude of rocks to choose from, so I built a little cairn to accommodate the camera.  I use a D750 which has a rear LCD screen that can rotate outwards; this helped me position the camera in such a way that it was level and aimed in just the right direction.  Altogether things worked out very well.

No fill flash used - notice how dark I appear against the background.

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