A Scenic World

So how does this whole creative process work, anyway?As far as my self-portraits go, they can be put into two categories. The first category is spontaneous shots. These probably account for the majority. They occur when I’m really busy that day, or when I don’t have any ideas, or when I just see some good light somewhere and try to capitalize on it.

The second category is the planned shot. By far, these are my most popular photos. Some of them require far more set-up than others, but the one I took yesterday reflects how most of these planned shots work.

I wake up every morning and have a cup of coffee on my porch. I always have a pen and paper handy so I can write down anything that comes to mind, whether it’s a to-do list for the day, an idea for a project in the future, or my self-portrait for the day.

At the moment, I’m doing an Olympics-and-book theme (yeah, whatever, it helps me to have some structure to the project). So yesterday, I threw around some ideas on paper: “High Bar,” “(Track and) Field,” “Floor Exercise.” Since it was raining, I knew I would have to do an indoor shot, so “Floor Exercise” it was.

Next I sketched out how I wanted it to look. I don’t do this for all my shots, but I do it at least once a week, and these are the ones I usually execute best. Nothing fancy, of course, because I’m not an artist. Just something like this (this is the actual sketch):

Next I had to setup the shot. This involving moving a fair amount of furniture (a bench, my bedside table, my computer chair, and some random cords that usually run behind the bench). I’ve moved my entire bedroom around before for a shot before, but thankfully this one was minimal.

I lost my remote control in Germany, so I had to set the focus for the shot first. The book served as an excellent stand-in for me.

Next, all I had to do was insert myself. I started out wearing a floral print dress and wound up in white pants and white shirt when I saw how nicely the light was bouncing off the white. The exposure was a bit tricky - it took four shots with me changing settings in “Manual” mode to get it right (I almost never get a shot right the first time I try). Note how the reflection on the wall behind me was purely from the reflection:

And there you have it: the making of #47, which made the front page of Explore, yay!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under Photography Tutorial, Photography, Shameless Promotion, 365. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.