How I made my Steemit Profile Pic

Recently someone asked me if I was an astronaut because of my profile picture.. I realised.. yes our profile pictures are small and hard to see so it could look like that.. which prompted me to think it would be a good idea to talk about how I made my profile picture, and since @felobtc recently started the steemitnamechallenge I figured this would be a nice follow on post.

I’m not really one for selfies or being in front of the camera in general. So doing a profile picture is always a pain for me and I’d rather not do it.. however, on the flip side, I am a fan of Tron, I love their visual effects and the costumes etc and decided I wanted a Tron inspired profile pic.

You know.. something cool like how Jeff Bridges looks in the movie here:

^{Source: Screenshot from Disney’s Tron Legacy Movie.}

So to achieve this look I need to do a little research.. and that research led me to EL Tape. As in.. ElectroLuminescent Tape. Amazingly cool stuff.. You can get it in wire, strips, panels .. panels you can cut into particular shapes. At one point I was considering buying massive strips to put on my walls to do away with traditional light bulbs.. that would have been SO cool.

Anyway, I used this stuff:
https://elwirecraft.co.uk/product/el-tape-2cm-x-40cm-neon-glow-strip-2/

Not this exact product, I got mine form amazon but I can’t find it on there anymore. I went with the white light option (obviously).

Next get yourself a hoodie, some double sided sticky tape and stick the EL Tape into the hood of the hoodie. If you want it to be more permanent it might be an idea to sew it in or something, the sticky tape doesn’t last long at all.

El Tape installed in the Hoodie	How it looks switched on with the lights out

Now comes the actual photography part. This is the trickiest part of the process. Taking a self portrait with a DSLR is hard. Especially if you do not have a flip screen on the camera or if you need to use manual focus. It requires a lot of trial and error, and error and error and error, some tearing out of hair and the occasional temper tantrum.

Doing this project I gained a new respect for people who do self portraits a lot and even more for those that do it well. If you want an example of someone who is totally crushing it with self portraits on steemit go check out @eveuncovered. I’m sure you already know of her, if not.. then what steemit rock have you been hiding under?

Back to the actual process:
To accomplish this I setup my DSLR camera on a tripod and tethered my camera to a laptop so I could use the laptop screen for a live screen view of what the camera could see. This made it easier for me to dial in the settings. I would stand in front of the lens and take some test shots as well as look into the laptop screen to make sure I was correctly framed and at the right distance from the lens in order to be in focus. I then marked the floor with masking tape where my feet should be in order to easily get back into position.

A remote shutter comes in handy here. I switched off the lights in the room so it was completely dark (I did this shoot in the evening so no outside light affected the shot. I wanted all light to come from the light strip inside my hoodie.

Then I started shooting.. looking straight into the lens, looking to the side, slightly up, slightly down .. trying to get the right angle.

As you can see, it took quite a few attempts … just to get ONE shot right. ….aaaand that is why I have so much awe and respect for people like @eveuncovered who do this kind of photography on a regular basis. It is NOT easy.

Needless to say after about 30 attempts I was done. As in I’d had enough, I was fed up. I figured that out of all these shots surely there MUST be one that worked out. Well this is what I ended up with:

I am not a member of the blue man group so clearly the color balance in this image is way off. A big part of that has to do with the EL Tape I used. Yes, it is white, but it is a very cool white which quickly becomes blue in camera and I used the basic ‘I’m shooting indoors' white balance setting on my camera.

So from there I did two things. The picture is pretty damn good but I wanted a more natural color to the image and I wanted a black and white version. So I pulled the image into lightroom, adjusted the brightness ever so slightly and converted the image to black and white producing this:

Then I took a virtual copy of the image and edited it in color. All this required was to move the color balance slider to the right making the image warmer and warmer until all the blue was out of my face. Leaving me with the final product here:

I know I have been a little vague on the details here in this post on my method but it is a case of there being not one single right way to do this. I can only suggest you experiment for yourselves, but I will say the absolute minimum you need for this is:

• a decent camera
• a tripod
• a timed or remote trigger release

That’s it. That’s how I made my profile picture for steemit. It was super fun and one day I would like to modify a leather jacket (like flynn’s in the movie) with EL strips. I have the jacket, but I need to loose some weight so I don’t look like a idiot when i wear the jacket. I have developed a bit of slush around the old mid section in the last few years!

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