Turning the camera on myself

I've always said that I like behind the person behind the camera, because it keeps me out of the photo. Just never been fond of photos of myself. However, I've been reading a lot of photography blogs lately that all say every once in a while, you should turn the camera on yourself. For one, it's a good way to practice portrait lighting. For a second reason, it puts you in your subject's shoes so you get a sense of how they feel with lights and the camera pointed at them.

With that in mind, I thought I'd give it a try with a three-light setup. The main light is a gridded small soft box to camera left, and I have another gridded box as a rim light that's up high pointing down toward my back. The third light has a 10-degree grid spot to give a small circle of light on the wall behind me. I turned things around from normal by using a dark green wall as the backdrop, with the studio white backdrop at camera right providing a little bit of fill bounced from the main light.

Lastly, I converted the image to black and white, because I think that seems to be some unwritten rule that when photographers do self portraits, they have to be black and white. Here is the final result.