This is a guest post by Crystal of 11:11. If you’d like to write a guest post for Style Sample, check out the guidelines and submit your idea.
Some of Crystal’s self-portraits
The easiest and most efficient way to take self-portraits would be to purchase some sort of remote for your camera. They can run fairly cheap to mid-range, and depending on the brand, they can work up to 300 ft away. I currently use a Phottix wireless remote that I bought on Ebay for about $40.
For those who don’t have remotes, there are a few tricks I’ve learned to help better my self-portraits:
1. Set up your tripod and figure out where you want to stand in the photo in relation to the framing of the camera.
2. Once you’ve picked the spot find some sort of found object such as a rock, a stick or even line up your camera to a crack in the sidewalk and focus your camera on that object.
3. This works best if you focus your camera on that spot and then switch your camera over to manual focus so the focus doesn’t change with each shot.
4. Set your self-timer and go stand next to your found object. The photo should be in focus each time.
Lighting
I tend to stick to only natural light so I don’t have to worry about lighting and shadows when I can’t really see the overall effect in self-portraits.
To create better interest and better photos, the most important factor to remember is the time of the day when you’re shooting. For even and attractive lighting to better highlight your look, I suggest shooting a little later in the evening or early morning. The mid-day sun usually provides a harsh light that does weird things to colors and is just difficult to shoot in overall.
Posing
When you have a remote I think it makes posing a little easier just because it’s easier to capture continuous motion. I tend to do small turns or movements to show off the clothing and just press the shutter button several times throughout the movement until I get that one ideal capture.
Move it, baby!
For people who use timers it’s a bit more difficult but not impossible. To avoid looking stiff I just have to emphasize the importance of moving!
It doesn’t even need to be anything drastic, even just a slight shoulder/hip shake to keep things from looking forced. I usually count down until I get to that last couple of seconds to do my movement so it doesn’t look like I’ve been holding the pose for a lengthy period of time.
- Walking across the view of the camera provides a natural pose that can often times show off the clothes nicely.
- Varying your head position can change up a pose so experiment.
- If the pose looks funny just change it up slightly and try again! Self-portraits are all about trial and error.
In the beginning to have a few poses that you can perform in just a few seconds. There are some simple things you can do to make the pose look more casual such as a lift of a leg, looking at the camera from over a shoulder etc. that don’t require much thought and from there just move around.
Shutter speed
It’s important that you keep your camera’s shutter speed on a mid-range speed to fast to capture these movements. If you have a camera where you can control the shutter I would suggest using a minimum of 1/50 speed for motion photos otherwise blurring might occur.
Overheard