Binoculars portrait (dscn4659_mod_vign_sm)

Self portrait with big binoculars (15x70).
È importante saper guardare lontano. View On Black

Some people asked me how i did this shot... Ok, I'll tell you!

It was twilight and there was a really soft and cool light outside... I put on a red t-shirt (yes, it was red...) and I've put my camera on a tripod, at she same height of my eyes, ten or twelve meters away. I zoomed, so I fill up the scene and flatten perspective, and played with esposition time and aperture until I was happy with them (I wanted a slight overexposed photo).
To take these shots I looked at the camera wth binoculars (I couldn't see anything, since it was too close to focus through binoculars!) and used a IR remote control to shot, you almost can see it on my right hand.

After that, I fired up digiKam and threw away a lot of shots, keeping only three or four of them, with the right exposition and composition and with interesting reflections on the lenses.

Next, I opened the most promising image in digiKam editor and cleaned up it using greycstoration to remove noise and unwanted details and cropped it.
Using curves tool I applyed a sigmoid to set black and white point and to increase constrast and saturation (the magic is here!).

I love vignetted images, dark and saturated colors on the borders, so I opened with Gimp the edited image, duplicated the backuground layer, selected using a lot of father and cut away the central part of the image, changed layer mode to "multiply", and duplicated this layer 3 times.
To add more vignette, I creaded a new, white layer on top, changed its mode to multiply (this way you can see the layers under it), and did a rectangular selection, smoothed and fethered it a lot, inverted and filled of black.

That's all! Hope you like the result!
Let me know if you have any suggestion or if you made similar images!