One of my favorite pastimes is shooting people's portraits. I almost feel "orgasmic" when staring at the work of famous photography portraitists (like Karsh, Testino, Newman, Ritts, Hurrell and others) and I've been looking for beautifully (lit and) photographed or painted portraits in museums, books and exhibitions all my adult life. I also used to paint portraits of family members and friends for many years but, recently, I kinda stopped doing that... My last brush and canvas work was that of my youngest sibling as the subject. I only use digital photography now along with the "usual suspect" software tools (PS, LR, Aperture, Pixelmator) and also do some digital painting with packages like Corel Painter, Scribbles, etc, to do portraits of graphically interesting faces. I even purchased a Wacom Cintiq 12WX tablet recently for easy drawing. However, nowadays, I can't get any freakin' models to pose for me. What do I do then? Autoportraiture is the obvious answer. As I'm aging and wrinkles grow all over my face, my skin gets ideal for deeply textured portraiture. The other day I discovered the Alien Skin Exposure 2 Black and White filters for Photoshop that possesses a number of interesting presets. One of those I tried and found quite cool. The so called blue filter that actually absorbs all skin colors but blue. Examples of the resulting shots you can see here and at my Flickr account, if you click the picture above. Worth trying that filter... BTW, both shots are done with one studio soft box (1x1m 500W) and no reflectors whatsoever (outside the surrounding ambiance objects). No software lighting effects either! At the lowest strobe power setting I still had to use a low 125 ASA value, I think, and relatively small aperture (16?) and max sync flash speed (250). 
To get the catch light in the eyes I had to put the box rather close to my subject, you see... On the background, find an unfinished Russian icon style Madonna from 2007 that I never managed to complete (I often do that, leaving paintings unfinished - sad to admit... such a lazy b@stard I can be from time to time...). Her painted garment ground color is blue-like, which, due to the blue filter applied, turned out almost white... QED! Finally, both shots shown here were done with a 40D Canon DSLR that, if we believed Douglas Kirkland (he should definitely know, shouldn't he?), is one sweet marvel that could easily challenge Mark III hands down! Of course, a camera body is useless without the proper glass and I am afraid mine, albeit made by Canon, was by far not the best money can buy (compared to Hasselblad's 150mm portrait Zeiss and Nikon's 80mm portrait lens, that is). Nevertheless, with a little help of a wee-bit of PS unsharp mask Bob's your uncle...
What a wonderful age of imaging we live in! I envy the generations born nowadays for the goodies they'll taste in their lifetime. Wish I believed in reincarnation...
To get the catch light in the eyes I had to put the box rather close to my subject, you see... On the background, find an unfinished Russian icon style Madonna from 2007 that I never managed to complete (I often do that, leaving paintings unfinished - sad to admit... such a lazy b@stard I can be from time to time...). Her painted garment ground color is blue-like, which, due to the blue filter applied, turned out almost white... QED! Finally, both shots shown here were done with a 40D Canon DSLR that, if we believed Douglas Kirkland (he should definitely know, shouldn't he?), is one sweet marvel that could easily challenge Mark III hands down! Of course, a camera body is useless without the proper glass and I am afraid mine, albeit made by Canon, was by far not the best money can buy (compared to Hasselblad's 150mm portrait Zeiss and Nikon's 80mm portrait lens, that is). Nevertheless, with a little help of a wee-bit of PS unsharp mask Bob's your uncle...What a wonderful age of imaging we live in! I envy the generations born nowadays for the goodies they'll taste in their lifetime. Wish I believed in reincarnation...
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