M Barker Semester 2 2013 VA12/IB11
100 Seriously Cool Self-Portraits (And Tips to Shoot Your Own!) How To Take a Self-Portrait
I recently ordered a product for my camera that I couldn’t wait to try out. Unfortunately, when it came in the mail, there was no one around to use as a good subject. Not to be stopped so easily, I decided to simply use myself as the subject.
I wanted to take a portrait with a shallow depth of field and very little detail in the background, so I grabbed my tripod and stood in the very center of my yard, away from trees buildings or any other substantial object. I setup the camera, looked through the viewfinder, and immediately realized this wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought.
Below you’ll find some helpful tips that I had to learn the hard way.
Tip #1: Bring Something to Focus On
The problem that I saw when I looked through my viewfinder was that I didn’t have anything to focus on aside from the items in the far distance. This of course would make for a perfectly blurry photo of me, which isn’t at all what I wanted.
One easy solution to this problem is to bring something to stand in your place. Height doesn’t matter so much as distance, but try to match it to yourself as best as you can for accuracy. If you have an extra tripod or light stand, these make perfect substitutes that will stand upright exactly where you need them. I was out in my yard so I grabbed a shovel from my shed, stuck it in the ground, focused and then moved the shovel. Rudimentary, but it worked perfectly.
Tip #2: Try Standing By a Corner
As an alternative to standing in the middle of nowhere, you might want to actually use a building or wall in your shot. In this circumstance your first instinct is to focus on the wall, but that might not work too well depending on your depth-of-field.
One trick that I discovered is to stand next to the end of a wall or at a corner. This way you can position yourself even with the wall and achieve a solid focus. So if you focus on the wall, then stand next to rather than in front of it, your focus should be much better.
Tip #3: Use Both Auto and Manual Focus
A good practice to get into when you’re taking self-portraits is to use a mix of auto and manual focus. First, focus on your stand-in object using auto focus. Then, with the object still in focus, switch your lens to manual focus.
This will give you the freedom to tweak settings, re-meter for changing light and anything else you need to all without screwing up your established point of focus. Just make sure you stand perfectly on your mark each time you take a photo.
Tip #4: Set the Timer High and Use Burst
Obviously, you don’t want to have to haul all out and run into the frame just as your camera takes the image. Give yourself plenty of time to get in position and figure out what you’re doing. Most cameras let you vary the length of the timer, check your manual for how to set yours.
In conjunction with the timer, you can usually set your camera to take multiple photos in succession. Even if all you need is one photo, it’s not a bad idea to have your camera snap five or ten so you can vary your pose/expression. This will give you much more variety when it comes time to choose the image. Just make sure you have your settings perfect before turning burst on, otherwise you’ll have a card full of unusable shots.
Tip #5: Capture You
My last tip is to use the images below only loosely as inspiration. A self-portrait should be a very personal expression, not simply a mirror of something you’ve seen elsewhere. Think about who you want to be and how you want to say that. Use props, scenery, pose and lighting conditions to convey your personality. And most of all, have fun!
http://photo.tutsplus.com/articles/inspiration/100-seriously-cool-self-portraits-and-tips-to-shoot-your-own/
John Suler's Photographic Psychology: Image and Psyche
John Suler's Photographic Psychology: Image and PsycheThe Varieties of Self-Portrait Experiences (extract)
Objective and Subjective Self-Portraits
Often we can’t tell for sure if a photo is a self-portrait unless the photographer tells us so. A number of factors contribute to the illusion that someone else might have taken the shot. First of all, some part of our mind assumes a person can’t be in two places at the same time – both behind and in front of the camera – even though another part of our mind, the part that is familiar with photography, knows better. The illusion is magnified when people place the camera on a surface or tripod to take a shot of themselves from a distance. The further away the camera, the less likely the viewer will assume that subject is the photographer. If people have their eyes closed or are not looking at the camera, it might appear as if they don’t know they are being photographed, which also leads the viewer to assume someone else took the shot. A subject looking outside the frame of the image, towards someone or something, suggests a presence external to the image that distracts the viewer’s attention from the subject’s presence as the creator of the image. Even looking into the camera can suggest the illusion of someone else being the photographer because the mind more easily accepts the reality of someone taking a shot of someone else, rather than the counterintuitive situation of a people looking at themselves taking a picture of themselves.
These kinds of self-portraits create the illusion of objectivity, as if pretending, playfully or quite deliberately, “this is how someone else captured me.” If we assume photographers were not posing for their own shots, we might attribute more authenticity, impartiality, or spontaneity to such depictions of their personality, which might be the photographer’s intentions. By creating the illusion of someone else’s presence, the objective self-portrait also suggests a relationship between the photographer and that imaginary person who took the shot. Consciously or unconsciously, the photographer might be referring to and posing for someone in particular. But who is that person, and what is the photographer thinking and feeling about that person? Photographers might invite the viewers to be that presence, encouraging them to experience, sometimes voyeuristically, the qualities of their personality they intended in the photo.
At the very least, objective self-portraits keep us guessing as to whether that particular portrayal of the subject was created by the subject or someone else. The reality of self-reflection is uncertain. Is it me seeing me, or someone else seeing me?
In the subjective type of self-portrait, the viewer feels more certain that photographers took the shots of themselves, as when we see their outstretched arms pointing the camera towards their bodies. We’re aware of the presence of the camera as a tool in helping them capture themselves. When photographers look into the outstretched camera, the sensation of self capturing self is magnified even more. The subjective or objective quality of the shot seems more ambiguous - even contradictory, deceptive, or comical - when the photographer is clearly holding the camera but looking away from it.
The presence of the camera becomes obvious, along with the fact that the shot is a subjective self-portrait, when people shoot themselves in reflective surfaces – especially mirrors, because we all quickly recognize the mirror as a tool for observing oneself. In a curious fashion of infinite regression, the photo captures the process of the photographer photographing the photographer photographing the photographer.
The subjective nature of the self-portrait might be more ambiguous when shooting into glass or metal reflections that distort the image of oneself or make it difficult to determine the viewpoint. Playful and sometimes perplexing paradoxes of self-reflection can be magnified by the use of unusual camera angles, or more than one camera, that keeps us guessing where exactly the equipment and photographer are located in the reflections, or even what is a reflection and what isn’t. As a simple example, imagine holding the camera at arms length to take a shot of yourself looking into a mirror. In the photo we see you gazing at yourself, but if we know this is a self-portrait, there's also the you taking the shot of you looking at yourself. In these complex reflection shots, layers of self-awareness blend and embed into each other, sometimes to such a degree that we lose a sense of the objective or subjective nature of the picture.
We might also lose track of the subjective/objective distinction when photographers include a printed self-portrait photo, or one displayed on a computer screen, into the new self-portrait. For example, imagine taking a shot of a photo in which you took a shot of yourself looking into the camera. You, and we, are looking at a picture that you took of a picture that you took of yourself looking at yourself taking the picture. The subjective or objective quality of the image takes a back seat to these paradoxes of self-reflection.
When photographers do many self-portraits, some people might call them narcissistic or exhibitionistic. The photographers themselves might even worry about these things (although truly narcissistic people don’t think of themselves as narcissistic). Tasteful objective self-portraits might help ease that impression of self-absorption, while subjective ones that emphasize oneself viewing oneself, like the mythical Narcissus staring into his reflection in a pond, might amplify that sense of self-preoccupation. On the other hand, viewers do sometimes consider objective self-portraits as a fake attempt to hide narcissism, while they might enjoy unpretentious and playful subjective self-portraits.
*The full text can be located at: http://truecenterpublishing.com/photopsy/selfportraits.htm