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The subject for this competition was "Emotion". Of all human emotions, anger is probably the most dramatic. With this in mind, I decided that the image should be dark and brooding, in the style of film noir.

When I look at this picture, I feel threatened by the menace of the subject. This photo is obviously of an angry man - the scowling face with the upraised finger to accentuate a point.

The lighting and stark contrast help in building the emotional tension in the image, as does the composition. The eye moves from the face to the finger, and the pointing finger is aimed out of the image (at the viewer?).

I like this image because it is a strong image with nothing to distract the viewer from the subject, or the emotion that the image portrays.

I cannot see any obvious points of improvement for this image (this doesn't mean there aren't any) - the judge on the night suggested that the subject should have been looking straight at the camera, but I do not agree. The eyes follow the finger, and to have rotated the subject straight at the camera would have destroyed the diagonal composition with the resulting (good) balance.

Technical

The combination of a fast shutter speed and a wide open lens gave a soft, dark background. This gave the problem of how to expose the subject. I wanted the face in sharp focus, with rather harsh lighting. This was done with an off-camera flash at camera right -- about half a meter from the subject, and half a meter from the camera. The close proximity of the flash to the subject was needed to get the fast fall off in light to avoid lighting the background too much. This meant that the power out of the flash had to be turned way down to avoid over-exposure -- hence the lowest power setting and the 4 stop neutral density filter. If anybody wants to know more about off-camera flash photography, I can recomend strobist.

Obviously, the simple way to light this photo would have been to use a TTL cable and an appropriate flash. So, why didn't I use such a setup? Simple. I didn't have one, and while I do have an SB400 flash to go with the D40, I don't have the (rather expensive) TTL cable. Anyway, I like to fiddle and make stuff like this myself. Then if it doesn't work I only have myself to blame.

The external flash was fitted with a home-made infra-red hot-shoe trigger, and was triggered by the on-camera flash. A blood red filter on the camera flash, combined with the lowest power setting available, meant that the on-camera flash contributed minimally to the lighting of the image. The entire set-up was triggered using a home-made remote.

The image was minimally processed with only a conversion to grayscales carried out by desaturation in UFRAW.

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