a sophisticated selfie

this is a slightly technical post. everyone can make a selfie with a mobile phone. no problem. however, things can get difficult if you want to do something more elaborated. like a hero shot from a very low angle looking upwards for example. This requires a tripod or similar. then you expose for the subject and you get something like this:

now this does not feel right. the background needs to be dark so you expose for the background:

problem: the subject becomes a silhouette. this can be nice but it is not what i wanted here. as a solution we need to add a flash to brighten the foreground. unfortunately, at very short shutter duration (like needed here) flashes use the hss-mode which lowers the power output significantly. to counter this a nd-filter is used to limit the shutter duration to 1/180 s. now we can use the flash at full power and get a decent photo with a dark background but properly exposed subject.