However if you give a presentation of your own self-portrait work You are really putting yourself out there. Not just your work, but you personally.
Silly me, I volunteered to do a program for the local camera club that I've been member of for 7 years. Why? Because next months Show & Tell category was to be Selfies/Selfportraits. And I knew I had quite the collection I could share and offer some interesting info on the subject. So, why not share?
When I started skimming my Lightroom Library to gather the goods I was actually quite amazed at the number I had. Not just from my iPhone but from some semi-serious Canon shoots, most of which were in 2012. As I made preparations I really got excited about it. These were strange feelings. I'm usually so nervous and stressed but this was fun.
I narrowed it down to 100 photos, then added some of my friend Sarah's that she offered and threw in a few from a guy at the last minute lest the men feel left out.
You see a good percentage of this club is men over 65 and I had a feeling a lot of them might stay home. (In fact afterward one guy told me he almost did and was glad he decided to come.)
For some reason the 'feeling of vulnerability' never did rear its ugly head. I talked about it and all the reasons why we shy away from selfies but I felt like I was in a bubble of protection. (Oh, thank you God!)
The whole thing went well. After our one hour of technical difficulty when my Macbook Pro wouldn't talk to the projection system, I had to load everything to a jump drive and use their PC. Thankfully Kathy had a few vague memories of how to use a PC and she helped with the slides. Thank you so much Kathy. And she even showed up on her birthday!
Here is a link to a movie I had created in a class that was a selfie shoot in 2012. I included a lot of not so great photos because I wanted it to just be real and normal. Self Shoot
Perhaps I'll do a little series on selfies this month......
