This is a week where things caught up on me quickly. All of the sudden, it’s Sunday evening and I still need to write both this blog post AND my newsletter. I have the topic picked out but I haven’t put ideas to paper, so to speak. The thing is, I want to be consistent, and I have learned a lot about what consistency looks like through my yoga practice. There are times when the post going out isn’t the very best and that’s okay, because for me, it’s about establishing the habit. 

SO

Keeping all of that in mind, I wanted to share some spontaneous self portraits from this week and how they came about in the hopes of inspiring you. 

Both of the following self portraits were inspired by this image:

I have an entire Pinterest board dedicated to self portrait inspiration. In fact, I will share with you the various boards I use and how I use them:

Self Portraits : this is self explanatory – I either pin images that I see that are inspiring to me OR I think of an idea and begin to pin images of that character. that is why you see images of Frida Kahlo and Maleficent 

Fine Art Portraits : here is where I put anything that is fine art portraiture. These have a specific look I am going for and I will try to learn everything I can about how they made the image. I will zoom in on the eyes to see the lighting and I will look up editing techniques on Youtube and Creative Live. When I have a specific character in mind, I will create a sub board so you’ll see one for Catherine from Wuthering Heights in this one 

You may be wondering “how did this image come from the one above?”. It’s because it was a big ol’ fail. I was trying to get the effect of having something between me and the camera lens, so I went to the shower in my bathroom downstairs. Funny enough, that shower glass is exceptionally clean so you can’t tell anything is there. I also had a bouquet of flowers but I could never get anything that I loved with the flowers. I took several images and here are the ones that made the cut

Though it was technically a fail, it ended up being one of my favorite self portraits. 

This is self portrait #2. I decided to put a plastic bag in front of my lens, which I secured with a hair tie. I sat in a pocket of light against the wall in my dining room. Again, I played with some flowers but preferred the one where I did not use them. 

I share both of these to show a little of my creative process. This isn’t the same as some of my other self portraits that I am in the process of creating where I am writing more of what I want them to represent and how I want to use clothes and light to communicate that. These were just some spur of the moment self portraits I decided to take this week and I think all of them are necessary and fun and good. 

Feel free to message me any thoughts or questions about self portraits!