7 Days of G7 (5 of 7): Self-Portrait

Many great plans have unraveled due to one or two unconsidered issues.  For instance, the Russian winter completely blindsided Napoleon and ultimately lead to his downfall.

(Actually, that's not true -- apparently the weather only got him during his retreat...  Well, the analogy still works as long as you have a warped view of history...)

In this case, I've had this idea of getting a shot of my new G7... with the G7.  Sort of a self-portrait.  In the end, the results were both sub-par, and better than I hoped...

The general idea was to set up a shoot in my bathroom since I have a mirror on my medicine cabinet that can be swung to provide different angles with respect to my main bathroom mirror.  Using mirrors in that way, it is possible to use the G7s flash to actually illuminate the G7 from the side and take a picture from an off axis.  I considered a lot of factors -- cleaning the mirror, a second light to better illuminate the G7 (triggered optically with a snoot on it), etc. 

But I forgot one big issue -- bathroom mirrors have the silver on the back of the glass, not the front.  As a result, there's always two reflections -- a slight one from the glass, and the main one behind it.  In this case, with very bright highlights, this causes very distracting issues as shown above.  (FYI, the mirrors in an SLR or TLR have the silver on the outside of the glass, avoiding this double reflection but making them very fragile!)

Yeah, so that didn't work.

But, as I was processing my images, I found the very cool image I opened the post with.  This is a shot of my G7 (twice) and me (twice), illuminated only by my G7.  I love the look of the shot, although I'm not wild about the composition (needed more space on the right).  I'd try to tweak it, but honestly I couldn't do it again if I tried.

Anyway, another happy accident as I get used to my G7!