For this shot, I initially wanted to do a golden hour with streaks of lights and shadow playing on my face. However, it has been since 2019 that I last remember the sun shining hard and bright in my room. So I used my ring light as an artificial light, making my concept more of a natural, casual, dramatic shot inside a room. I also bought LED monochromatic radial lamps since I wanted to make an optical snoot to cast the illusion of window grills painting on my face, but I am so lucky that it didn't have the most common colors--orange and yellow--I did not want to opt for color grading, yet.

Taking a look at Figure 1., since the sun was not shining enough at the window and only a mere cloudy daylight exposure, even when it felt like 50 degrees Celsius outside, I still positioned myself facing it to hit all the remnants of light possible as the subject. Since it wasn't enough, I used my ringlight dialed at warm setting and max exposure and angled it on the right side of my face to add dynamics and contrast to my body--this prevented any flatness for the shot, and accentuated the natural structure and curves of the human anatomy. This also added a nice shadow on the left part of my body, specifically my face, which created a faint silhouette. The angled light gave me leeway into turning it into a dramatic, moody shot while still preserving the casualness by wearing a white sando and a background of random objects.

If you're going to ask why I did not just position myself with my half side exposed to the window light, creating the natural dynamic shadow I wanted, it was because the DOF would not be possible as I was only a few inches away from the cabinet which would give the camera a hard time to blur the background. If I did try to move farther from the cabinet but maintain that half-body exposed angle, no sunlight would reach across the other half of the room. By positioning it the way I did, this allowed me to have that casual, moody room shot while successfully executing the DOF since I was far enough with my background to blur the casual things I had in my room, since I wanted that "Oh, I found a camera while decluttering, and I'll use it in the middle of my chore" moment. Going into the technicalities, I opted for a 640 iso, which is just on the decent average dial since I had a maxed out light shining well enough and close to my face. Adjusting it to a higher ISO would just leave me an overexposed shot, which would create a harsh stamp on light on my face--it would be overkill. Positioning myself around 1 and a half meters from my back, I utilized a 1.8 aperture to create a shallow DOF, leading to bumping up the blur of the objects from the background, which ensured it's blurry enough to not draw attention away from the subject. 

To execute this shot, I would turn off the incandescent light to further emphasize the contrast of the PC screen light flashing my face, to the darkness of my background. Supplementing the maxxed out light from the PC screen, I turned on two warm ambient lights, one night lamp placed at the top of the shelf on my left, and one LED cloud lamp hanging at my right. These lights help softly expose and illuminate my background, to give distinction that I am in a room, and remove flatness if I were the only subject at play, sitting at my PC set-up. I utilized a frame within a frame composition where I situated my phone camera just below the monitor, where the monitor can block a part of the camera and execute the angle I was going for through a mini phone stand. Since it was still a relatively dark room, I used ISO 1000 to accompany it, as increasing it would introduce evident noise, which was already slightly present in the shot.

Although it was night, the cabinet at my back would still be noticeable at my background to go left unnoticed, so I used a 1.8 aperture to also give a shallow DOF and blur out the background, which is not entirely necessary for this shot--emphasis on entirely as this gives dimensions and proximity nuances of the subject to its surrounding. For the shutter speed, I kept it at 1/24 seconds at best, to prevent further exposing myself and ruining the artificial lighting I have set up for the intended shot. Although it's low, the 3 lights flashing my face were enough to not have motion blurs in the photo and still keep it from any movements.  

Looking into the photographic composition, I have used Rule of Thirds where I positioned the leftmost vertical line to align with my pupil and mouth (basically the head entirety on the line), and the bottom-most horizontal line to the shoulder blades. I also played with elements of color with the shot, specifically by color-grading it to green, which complements the contrast and emphasis of my lighted face against the dark end of the background. Again, I have utilized a frame within a frame where the monitor is the outer frame with my eyes looking at it.