Art and photography are very important to me. Unfortunately in recent years, I have been making less and less time for my art. I had heard of groups over at Flickr where the idea was to take one photo a day, no matter what for a whole year. Some of the groups are any photo, and try to have themes for each week (not required) and others are selfportraits only. I joined one of each, but committed to myself to do one selfportrait everyday. This would fulfill the requirements of both groups, and give me the option of doing something different for the non-selfportrait group.
I have done self portraits in the past, but not that many, and I always feel funny doing them. I don't particularly like looking at myself in the mirror, and these days it really underlines the difference in how old I think myself to be and how old I am or am looking.
Here's a recap of the first week:
Day 1.
Actually I got started a day late on Jan 2. Because it's a leap year, I still get to do 365. Ok, nearly missed this one too. Got started at about 11pm. I had these battery powered xmas lights:
Ok, mostly I was glad to have the first one done. Whew!
Day 2
Ok, 11pm again. Well, lets play with fire. And a mirror. Could be fun, could be cliche'.
This one was more technically challenging. I manually adjusted the white balance and set up the tripod and whoops! forgot to turn the flash off:
I debated about using this one, but felt that maybe that was cheating. Using weird effects to draw attention from my ugly mug didn't feel very honest. I ended up using the shot I was going for and eventually got:
Day 3
I don't really know what I was thinking. It was close to midnight and I have this funky color changing Hotei lamp. I didn't feel like setting up lamps and I started playing around and kindof liked the contact illumination. It's kindof cheesy, but I like the colors:
Day 4
I really wanted to do better today, but the shot I set up was socontrived, I'm too embarrassed to show it. No, you really don't want tosee me in an insect mask with glowing eyes created by shoving LEDcandles in the eye sockets...This was taken balancing my camera on my knee while waiting for a movie(Juno) to start. There was nooo light.
I figured it was better to get a blurry underexposed shot done than nothing:
Day 5
Trying to get outside, I finally did, still at night. 9:30 after my Men's group met. I was kindof depressed, decided to let it all hang out. Also, I removed a lot of the color. it was interesting that my head basically remained unchanged after I had turned all but the red channel down. I brought the green back a bit.
Day 6
Didn't get out again. Hmm, will I run out of ideas? I don't know. I've been eye-ing some of our toy robots for a while. Ended up with a me and my Teddy shot. Had fun playing with this one in photoshop.
Day 7
In spite of a beautiful warm day, in which I actually got outside, I ended up waiting until late again. I had tried to do a street shot similar to this but my first attempt went awry and I was underdressed, as the temperature had dropped quite a bit. Ended up making faces while lying in bed. In the Camera LCD, I thought this one looked like Mr. Clean. Gave it my fake Holga treatment in photoshop. Maybe next week, I'll actually use the Holga (a cheap plastic chinese film camera.)
Are you as tired of looking at my face as I am? I've thought several times this week, is this really worth it? Shouldn't I be doing something more productive with my time? Should I really be writing this article?
Well, one day at a time...
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