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Strobe with full power. Camera: Canon EOS 400D Digital Exposure: 0.005 sec (1/200) Aperture: f/9.0 Focal Length: 50 mm I needed a profile picture for my G+ profile. So I decided to shoot a self-portrait and I wanted it to be pretty much low-key. So here's how I done it: We have couple of black glass slide doors in our house so I decided to use one of them as a background. The lens choice was quite obvious. I chose Canon 50mm f/1.8 as it is quite nice lens to shoot portraits. I also have Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 but that was too long to use in my tiny room. I wanted to use aperture f/8.0-f/11.0 which are the best apertures to give quality photos with the lens. It should also provide me a photo with no bokeh because that's not what I needed in this photo. As the glass on the slide door reflects straight light pretty well I had to keep light away from it. So I didn't want any of atmosphere lighting involved in the photo. I started testing without strobe which aperture and exposure does leave me totally black photo. With f/9.0 and 1/200s I got a histogram with only one pixel line in the left. Now that's just what I needed. Now to build strobe setup. So I put the strobe to the right side and used it with bounce umbrella as I didn't have much space in the room. I wanted to leave the left side very dark so I didn't use any reflectors. There was also a black slide door which reflected a little amount of light quite nicely. I ended up using my strobe with full power about 1 meter on my (as a photographer) right. I tested a few spots with the strobe until I found a good spot. I wanted to pop the textures of my skin up but I didn't want to use too steep angle because that would have left the left side too dark.