Rejuvenating the perception of shaving brushes

Singing in a shaving brush I had the idea for this picture while thinking how to try and convince somebody that using shaving brush, shaving foam, and razor, is not necessarily stuff for old men. (Actually, I can’t really say that, because trying to explain with words an illogical process such as the birth of an idea is only an illusion. Yet…)

Technically, I was constrained by the difficulty of taking self-portraits without an autofocus camera (an Old C/Y Carl Zeiss Tessar 45mm f:2.8 was mounted on a Sony NEX). Therefore I stretched a long piece of blue cotton across the room, vaguely parallel to the camera sensor, I focused on it, and I took care to keep my hand on it. The cotton was later removed in Photoshop.

The light came from all I have: two small Bowens soft-boxes with fluorescent bulbs: one lower than the camera, on the left (of the camera), the other one higher, on the right. The aperture was kept at f:2.8. The muslin background was hanging from a horizontal bar mounted on two Manfrotto Autopoles.

The image is available on iStockphoto.

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