Mirror Selfie

An image from a recent series of self-portraits: a somewhat more sophisticated mirror selfie with a Pentax. 📷👩🏻

nina shadow closeup november 2018 b 2000 px.jpg

Made of Summer

Beyond photography, my opportunities to create non-commercial art are very limited due to, you guessed it, time constraints. But the interest is still there. So I've decided to do the next best thing and make something that is less time-consuming than an intricate drawing, yet no less creative.

The result? Another "natural portrait" of Japanese musician Morrie literally made of summer: flowers, greens, blueberries, cherries, apples...Good music inspires what I'd like to think is interesting art.

In general, my "natural portraits" are meant to emphasize the mutability of nature, its growth and decay. The very structure of any given piece is highly unstable: imagine putting each berry together as the wind in the Rocky Mountains decides to play tricks on you! Sometimes, it's worth keeping and documenting such mistakes, as they are part of the process.

Once the portrait is done, its constituent parts get "recycled" back into nature. In this particular case, delicious berries and fruit from a local farm were, well, eaten! 

In the end, the only record of a "natural portrait's" existence is preserved through photography. Though unlike my previous exemplars, I've also decided to go one step further and create a 6-second timelapse out of the consecutive photographs I had taken of the creative process.

Self-Portrait

It's been a very long time since I've taken anything other than a smartphone selfie. Therefore, today I forced myself to at least photograph myself in front of the mirror for five minutes with a real camera.

"Forced? Girls love taking photos of themselves!"

That they do. Except ladies, who are also photographers, tend to be perfectionists. So, where a simple selfie would do, a real portrait may not.

But this little experiment turned out fairly well. Whereas it's obviously not advisable to have strange shadows on one's face when capturing a head shot, sometimes the said shadows may lend to worthwhile artistic affects.

As is it case here. At least I hope so.

In the very least, my eyes look their hazel best, not brown as they often appear. And that's enough for this perfectionist.

For now.

Self

I'm not the biggest fan of capturing self-portraits—not because of the timers and numerous takes—but because there are so many worthwhile ideas, but so little time. However, I've (vapidly) decided to update the covers for my social networks with none other than yours truly. (To be fair, my preference usually is my nature-and-wildlife photography, not "selfies.")

As a result, I—once again—end up with clean, muted minimalism. As that is normally my preference in graphic design, perhaps I should stick with it.