I was half-hearted about a dressing up shoot this afternoon but went ahead anyway (seeing as how I'd washed my hair and shaved my legs etc last night in preparation).
It normally takes just a little while to set up the camera framing (trying to get exactly perpendicular to the wall but also today trying to establish a 5:4 aspect ratio which involved using a measuring tape and positioning a bit of paper to blank out part of the LCD as the D5100 doesn't allow different aspect ratios to be selected, what!) and getting the exposure and white balance settings right - but somehow today I managed to faff around for the best part of two hours and still wasn't sure at the end of that that things were quite right - but went on to spend another couple of hours taking pictures, half-heartedly still. Ug. I had some new clothes (including a shirt and skirt I felt great in) but I'd exhausted these same ideas I was working with a couple of weeks ago. Fail.
Also afterwards I changed back to male clothing (warmer!) and couldn't find my hair band, I almost always have it tied back. I thought I'd take a 'self-portrait as male' for once with my S95 digicam parked on the mantlepiece, and so cue 'camera-face'. When crossed-dressed I nearly always think of MM when posing (a truly supportive mate from Myspace days) which helps me be positive and feel good, this time I noticed immediately behind the camera on the mantlepiece was a framed photo I'd taken of my mum a couple of years before she died (back in October 2004). So I took another photo but this time of me looking at the photo behind the camera (effectively the same as if I was looking into the lens), looking at my mum looking at the camera/me. The result is I think my face looks different. Normally after a loved one dies you only see them in dreams and old photos, so there was a strange intensity to this capturing a moment of direct looking.
This is a short series. One image (also making it a non-series). It's called 'Portraits While Looking at Photographs of People (my mum)'.
And here is the complete series:
It normally takes just a little while to set up the camera framing (trying to get exactly perpendicular to the wall but also today trying to establish a 5:4 aspect ratio which involved using a measuring tape and positioning a bit of paper to blank out part of the LCD as the D5100 doesn't allow different aspect ratios to be selected, what!) and getting the exposure and white balance settings right - but somehow today I managed to faff around for the best part of two hours and still wasn't sure at the end of that that things were quite right - but went on to spend another couple of hours taking pictures, half-heartedly still. Ug. I had some new clothes (including a shirt and skirt I felt great in) but I'd exhausted these same ideas I was working with a couple of weeks ago. Fail.
Also afterwards I changed back to male clothing (warmer!) and couldn't find my hair band, I almost always have it tied back. I thought I'd take a 'self-portrait as male' for once with my S95 digicam parked on the mantlepiece, and so cue 'camera-face'. When crossed-dressed I nearly always think of MM when posing (a truly supportive mate from Myspace days) which helps me be positive and feel good, this time I noticed immediately behind the camera on the mantlepiece was a framed photo I'd taken of my mum a couple of years before she died (back in October 2004). So I took another photo but this time of me looking at the photo behind the camera (effectively the same as if I was looking into the lens), looking at my mum looking at the camera/me. The result is I think my face looks different. Normally after a loved one dies you only see them in dreams and old photos, so there was a strange intensity to this capturing a moment of direct looking.
This is a short series. One image (also making it a non-series). It's called 'Portraits While Looking at Photographs of People (my mum)'.
And here is the complete series:
