Behind the Scenes - by Jonnyfilmboy
Now for me, I didn’t care about the “meaning” of the self-portrait. In other words, I didn’t care if people looked at my self-portrait and thought, “This is how he sees himself”. What I wanted to do was create a shot of myself that would have meaning in itself, independent of whether or not it was considered a self-portrait or not. Seeing what other people were submitting, lots of portraits, lots of shots in a mirror, etc., I wanted to do something completely different.
OK, how did I create this shot? First of all, I had a specific mood and effect in my mind of what I wanted to do. The idea for this shot was based on a very moving National Geographic photo of a chimp in captivity. It inspired me to create a similar shot, but with much more texture and color. The only way I could have done this was with digital photography. I could have theoretically burned up a bunch of shots and picked the right ones on film, scanned them and then edited them in PS, but it would have taken much longer and wouldn’t have been as good. Because I could preview what I had captured with my camera, I could change exposure, lighting, aperture, everything with very little effort. I used a Nikon D100 and Photoshop CS to edit them. I could have also used PS 7.0 but I was trying out CS….. Full Article.