I remember now. Taking a selfie every day was not meant to produce a great portrait or a new pose. It was to learn and remember how my gear works. I was asked to take photos of an elementary school graduation and found that I don't remember how my tripod works, how Live View works, or how autofocus works. Thank God I did not try shooting with a flash or with a wirelessly tethered iPad. It took me a couple of days to get back in the saddle. I even found the answer to an old mystery: why doesn't my Canon 6D fire the flash in Live View shooting mode. It does! But the flash needs to be Canon. For a third-party flash (mine is Yongnuo) a settings tweak is needed -- and it still may not work.
Today I tried something rather different from the Fall 2020 series of selfies. All of those were taken with an off-camera light because -- that's the thing to do. And it probably is, and I will get back to it. There was a lot of tweaking of the light position, angle and power. This here is a straight ETTL flash with +1 EV firing sideways into a white painted door to my right with a white foamcore board to my left as a fill bounce.
Shot at night, so yellow ambient light in the room was a problem -- you never want to mix white flash light with yellow ambient light unless you are willing to gel the flash orange and correct white balance in post. So I was shooting with the lights off. To help the camera focus in the dark, there is a small, but very powerful LED light on the desk in front of me. It is strong enough (and the correct temperature) to provide a nice fill lifting the shadows under the eyes.
I was happy with the look of the photo out of the camera; I thought it pretty convincingly emulated a daytime shot lit by a window. But then my kid wandered in and peeked over my shoulder at Lightroom. She is not into photography, so I tried dazzling her by quickly changing the look of the photo with various new presets that Adobe has added or at the very least rearranged. All of sudden, one of the presets called Cool Light sort of jumped out at me, and I decided to keep it. The base profile is Artistic 04.
