Fear of self (portraits)

So, I faced a fear of mine today: putting myself in FRONT of the camera. I feel like I should get some sort of gold star or something. You have no idea how much I love to take pictures. I just love it. I love to set up a shot and figure out what’s going to be in focus, what’s not, what’s in the background, what’s in the foreground, where the light is coming from and what my subject looks like and where it will be in the photo. I love all those things. Unless I’m in front of the camera.

I envy all the girls that have countless photos on their facebook pages. They can smile all pretty for the camera and come out looking like a supermodel. My sister-in-law, Crystal, is like this.  I don’t think I’ve seen one, solitary bad picture of her. Sometimes it makes me want to call her bad names.

I found a tutorial on how to take a self-portrait of yourself. Sounds like a no brainer, right? Not so, according to selfiemagic.com. When I first stumbled upon her blog I thought to myself, “Of course I’d love taking pictures of myself if I looked like that.” But while looking at some people that post on her site, I found lots of girls that looked…normal and their self portraits came out just fine. Then I found myself thinking, “I should try that.”

And try I did. Oh boy, I got some doozies. They ranged from just out of focus to terrible. Disturbing to downright scary. Some were nauseating, even. But I picked a few that I thought weren’t too bad. If professionals have to take a few just to get a good one, why would I be any different. With a little help from Aperture, I made them even better.

But I learned a few things about myself. I never knew that I had circles under my eyes. I never knew my mouth was crooked. I mean it. Think bell’s palsy. But with a little bit of cropping and retouching, I’m circle free and no one is wiser to my novocain affected lips. No need to worry, I won’t be posting daily self-portraits of myself. There’s no amount of retouching that will fix my tummy pooch or short legs but it was an experience. And I might be willing to try it again.