Self portraits, yay or nay?
March 4th, 2010 | filed under: Personal, photo | tags: photography, self portrait, thoughts | I’ve always had a little bit of reservation and discomfort about self-portraits. It’s probably something I have to put aside in the name of photography, but it’s just something that I’m never 100% comfortable about. It’s kinda like my fear of “street photography” aka taking people’s pictures without their consent. I feel completely comfortable doing it in a sly manner, but it’s hard for me to just straight up take pictures of people close up.Another thing that makes me a little nervous is setting up lights and everything in public for a photo shoot. This is something I know I just have to get over, and it won’t really stop me, but it still makes me nervous.
A few influences that have encouraged me to just be a fool in the name of photography (per se), and just forget all this emotional nonesense are the very popular photographers Aaron Nace (some pics), who started off mainly doing self portraits before landing some jobs, and Dustin Diaz, who took a picture a day for a year (aka 365 project), with a good portion of those pictures being self-portraits.
I don’t really have a problem with self portraits, I’ll never have a majority of my pictures be self portraits, and I don’t plan on removing self portraits from my photo arsenal, it will always be somewhere in between. Exactly where, I don’t know, but I don’t plan on caring about it very much. I do, however, hope to give up on over analyzing everything and just going to work. ;-)
Just me being a weirdo. No big. (click for large / uncropped)
~ Jon
Nice to know what is happening in your life.
hey Mom, I didn’t really say anything about my life in here, but thanks for the comment. :) Love you!
YAY.
I feel the same about taking pictures of people/setting up public shoots. It’s nice to know someone else knows what it’s like to hope you aren’t in someone’s way or to not be bothered by people watching you.