In February I decided I wanted to start a self portrait project. I honestly prefer to be behind the lens and I am one of those people who is extremely self-critical in photos so I thought this would be a good challenge for me. I put out a post asking for ideas and just got one back – a 1950’s icon. Of course, it had to be Marilyn Monroe in the white dress!
At the time our local party store was closing down so I was able to pick up a costume and wig for very little and then I set up for the shoot. For the fan, I used a bounce house blower that we had in the garage which gave just enough air movement without blowing me away too much. Unfortunately my remote was out of battery so after putting my camera on the tripod I had to change my settings to a delayed self-timer and I set it so I could get 9 shots out of one press of the shutter. One of the hardest parts of a self portrait can be nailing the focus, to do this I first put a spare light stand where I planned to stand and then I focused on it, changed to manual focus so my camera wouldn’t shift the focus point and then placed a chalk mark on the floor of where I needed to be. Then it was just a matter of hitting the shutter and running back onto the chalk mark, striking a pose and moving between each click to get variations. Here’s the end result….
After posting this photo I started to get lots of suggestions and ideas from other people so I made a list and added some of my own. I went back to the party store to see what pieces they had that would make up a costume. Some of the characters and themes will take me a while to find the right piece but I am on the lookout! I decided to make it a monthly challenge.
For my next self portrait I went with something simple but pretty cool. I came up with an alter ego using temporary tattoos and a whole lot of sass. I had to ask my mum to come help me with the tattoos since some of the placements were tough to get. Unfortunately she forgot to take the plastic off of some of them so I didn’t have as many as I had originally planned. The fun part of this one was that I haven’t chewed bubble gum in years so at first I was gagging on the pure amount of sugar in it and secondly I got so many photos where I was chewing in between shots trying to get a good bubble going or with deflated bubbles.
When it came to taking the tattoos off rubbing alcohol just wasn’t working for me so I had the brilliant idea of using a pumice stone. Needless to say it took the tattoos off but also a layer of my skin…..sigh!
My third portrait, I went with a 1920’s flapper. For the edit I wanted to make it look aged so I used a sepia tone. This wig actually had some strands of gold glitter in which didn’t fit the look but the sepia tone hid those which was an added bonus. Since I am not a smoker I had to find a stock photo of a cigarette and add it in photoshop.
If you have seen the Lady Gaga video “Just Dance” you will know that she strikes some amazing poses. I knew I wanted to try and capture some of those for my next self portrait and I also wanted to get both the poses against a wall and around the sofa which meant that this session had two different sets, two outfits and two lighting set ups which added an element of difficulty. Another aspect that made this tricky is that the poses she does are through movement and obviously a photo is still so it was hard to capture the pose without the movement.
For June I wanted to show that Love is Love and so I went with a simple but effective concept. The hardest part of this one was creating a layer of rainbow in photoshop that I could use to ‘paint’ on the wall and have it look realistic enough.
I had my hair and makeup artist coming in anyway so I decided to ask her to give me big hair and bright makeup to create an 80’s themed self portrait. My hair is so straight and generally won’t hold a curl (I even tried getting a perm at one point to give it some shape and it didn’t work at all!) so the fact that Erin was able to get any volume to it is amazing!
If you would like to see my monthly self portraits as I release them or to see more from each session like my facebook page. Feel free to comment with any suggestions for themes or characters and I will see if I can make them happen.
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