Another month, another update on the self portrait project of mine. I have to say that I am getting more and more comfortable in front of the camera and that allows me to try new and weird ideas. Some of those work out and others don’t… That’s how it is. Without further delay, here are the stories and self portraits of this month.
Week 13: The struggle of the half baked idea
I am going to stop saying if I was late or not, just assume I was late and sometimes you might be wrong ;). This week I did not really have a clue what I was doing… That is a common theme within my process of creating these self portraits, but this week I had half an idea, took the photo and waited 3 weeks to edit it. As I am writing this, I just got an idea, but not sure if it will work… I am telling you this to show that no one has it all figured out and everyone is just trying and pretending that they know what they are doing. So don’t be afraid to do the same.
Back to the self portrait. Below I will show you the photo that I took and the final edit. While taking the photo, the idea was that I would use the light cast on me by the lightbulb to photoshop something in. That was the whole idea; future Robin will photoshop SOMETHING in… Thanks past Robin, thanks a lot.
As you can see, present Robin worked it out 🙂 I am a huge potterhead and decided to show that in a self portrait. I am quite proud of the portrait.
Week 14: Flowers and photoshop
This week was my week of photoshop challenges. If you haven’t seen that video yet, click here to go to the video.
The idea for this portrait was to take a head shot of myself and use photoshop to add flowers. I have seen this somewhere on instagram and thought I would give it a try myself. I found a tutorial and took the photo. Then I had an hour in photoshop (as that was the challenge for the video). The result is kind of okay, but I also edited a photo from the series I took and thought I would share that one too here.
Week 15: Dyeing my hair
As you might have seen in my self portraits, I am a natural blonde. But I have wanted to dye my hair and I never had the courage. So I just sometimes would edit my hair to be a different color. After some consideration (5/6 years) I finally decided to go for it and dye my hair red. I thought I would show this in a self portrait where I would combine two photos. One of the photos would be taken before the having my hair dyed and the other would be taken after. Below you can see all three photos. I noticed that the one after the dyeing, is not exactly sharp, but none of the ones from the session were sharp 🙁
This edit was a process. At first I did not like the result of the photoshop at all… I just looked really weird to me, but after coming back to it later, it looked way better already.
Week 16: Full body posing
This week I wanted to try my hand at posing my entire body again. I’ve tried it a couple of times before, but am still not exactly comfortable doing it. My main struggle with it at this moment is that there are so many aspects to it. Once I find a pose that I kind of like, my hands or arms seem weird. When I get those where I like them, my face looks way too focused on that and it looks weird. So I want to keep doing it more to get better at it and more comfortable.
I want to add that when I am not taking the photo all by myself, it gets easier. This same week I took some portraits with my boyfriend and was quite comfortable posing in front of the camera. So probably the whole self portrait aspect to it makes it more difficult as well.
I recorded the whole process of this self portrait and turned it into a vlog type video. You can find that here.
Week 17: Color contrast
This week I wanted to focus on colors. With my red hair I could create a contrast with green as they are opposite colors on the colorwheel. For this green I grabbed a plant and used my curtains which I still need to cut short. Then I just set up my camera with my 50 mm F/1.8 lens. I chose that lens to create a blurry foreground. Then I just sad down and tried many different poses and faces. You can find my favorite photos of the session below.
In the editing process I put emphasis on getting the greens in the photo and focusing on the skin color. I really like the results and hope you do too!