Mirror Image

Head Scratching

I had a Camera Club competition to enter this week, in fact I've had the option for over a month with the deadline being last night. The theme was 3 or 5 (use your imagination they said). By 2pm yesterday I still had nothing so I all but abandoned the idea of entering.

Just then a shaft of light shone down and a rare thought left the synapses of my dead creative centre. By pure luck the previous week I had dismantled a broken up mirror to use for future projects, so I got all the broken shards together (carefully I might add) and tried arranging them in some sort of order using 5 or 3 at a time.

Well it was a start but I still didn't have a clue about what I was going to use as a focal point all I was doing was shuffling glass around like the ape-man creature in 2001 A Space Odyssey playing with his bones:

Unlike him though, the answer was literally staring back at me.. It was me that would be the focal point.
It all fit into place, all I needed was 5 decent shaped and sized bits of mirror and by slightly altering each of their angles there would be 5 of me in the final image.

Getting My Act Together

If only it were that simple.. How do you photograph a mirror image without getting the camera in the frame?
The fact that I could see 5 mirrored faces meant that I was positioned correctly but without replacing my head with the camera how could I capture the same vision?
After much jiggery-pokery, cursing, and regret I discovered what can only be described as .. common sense.
If I can see the camera in every mirror the camera should be able to see me.

As long as the camera was next to my head but not showing in the mirrors I should get away with any slight difference in displacement.

Next problem.. lighting.
The photo will be shot in darkness so I can control any stray light source or reflection, so where could I place the remote flash gun? I initially placed it pointing to my face and to the left of the set but that made the left side of my face dark (n.b. left side of a mirror is the right side of me).
The obvious place was to place the flash gun on a tripod behind and slightly above the set which is what I did with some success.

Trial And Error

Looking at the first draft of images however, I noticed that my eyes appeared lifeless as there were no highlights in them indicating any potential brain activity. This was the result of the flash being so high up. So to solve this new annoyance I used my trusty LED torch and shone it directly into my eyes at the same time as firing the remote shutter control.

When using flash this way shutter speeds and apertures are not so important (as long as they are within reasonable limits) as the flash will do it's job and the ambient darkness will prevent over exposure but the shutter speed wasn't long enough to capture the dimmer light of the LED so I needed to slow the shutter speed to about 1/30th second.

Checking the camera view screen after every press of the shutter release I eventually reached an almost satisfactory set of images.

Tidying Up

There was still something missing.. I mean what could be worse than one photo of me? .. 5 photos of me..
So I did the unthinkable for any self-respecting selfie-taker.. I looked away from the camera .. four times - 2 to the left 2 to the right, taking shots each time a la:

Using a photo editor (Paint Shop Pro 2018 in my case) I swapped 4 of the mirror images in the front-facing frame and replaced them with their equivalents in the side-facing frames. And that was pretty much it.Competition well and truly entered in 3 hours from conception.

On reflection (pun intended) I would have preferred to make the mirror outlines more visible but as the theme was 3 or 5 I felt I had achieved the basics of the picture and left it there.

And as a tribute to Queens Bohemian Rhapsody I titled it 'I'm Just A Poor Boy'.

This was the state of the 'studio' with bits of groud up mirror littering the table and floor.
Next time I'll be reporting on how to clean a room before the warden does her rounds.

Ingredients:

1 Idea
1 Nikon D5200 18-300mm lens
1 Speedlight Flash master and slave units
1 Remote shutter release cable
2 Tripods
1 Table
Multiple shards of mirror
1 Black board and white tack
1 Cheap LED light
1 Blackout curtain (to hide the background)
1 Brush and Dustpan