Selfism

Hello everyone,
Sometime back when I was bored and had nothing to do seriously, I just scrolled thru my own gallery. I was little surprised to find many self-portraits in there. Most of them are moody/conceptual kind of stuff. What I understood is that, slowly it has become a habit for me to shoot more self portraits. (Yeah, I call a photo as portrait whenever people are there in the frame, whether its a classic old-style portrait or environmental one etc...) On the process of my photography it's developed as an unintentional project. Let me call it as project 'selfism'.

The story behind this is.... I use to go for photo shoots on weekends with my photographer friends. The moment we reach the location, we all do our own jobs without disturbing each others. I have a taste of shooting landscapes with human element in the frame. I personally feel it adds something into the landscape photos. During our shoot, I can't ask my fellow photographers to pose for me. So, I started posing for myself. When I first started, I never thought I would shoot these many self portraits. I'll continue this selfism till the day I run out of posing options. :)

The technique I use is... There is a mode in DSLRs called "Self-timer mode with 'n' number photos". This will fire after 10 seconds once you press shutter. I use to select 10 photos (which will be safer... at least one out of 10 will be good). I normally shoot this with higher aperture to achieve long exposure photos. So that, I never had focus problem.

'Click-run-stand/sit' is the formula till I get the desired result.I'll repeat number of times with different poses.

Here are some photos of selfism. There are many photos unprocessed.



This is the first ever selfism photo I tried. Tried to get the ghost look of mine in the surreal landscape. This is 30sec exposure photo. I came out of the frame after around 20 seconds, which gave the 'lesser opacity' (ghost) look of my image.

EXIF: f/22, 30 sec, iso-100

This was shot in 'ghost town' in Ras Al Khaimah. Awesome spot for such photography.

EXIF: f/18, 2 sec, iso-200

EXIF: f/10, 30 sec, iso-100

EXIF: f/9, 5 sec, iso-100

This tree is joined in my favorites list recently. I had several shots on that particular morning.

EXIF: f/8, 2.5 sec, iso-200

EXIF: f/8, 2.5 sec, iso-200

I wanted to have blurry shot of mine while walking away from the tree. Luckily a bus carrying construction workers entered into the frame to add some spice into the shot.

EXIF: f/8, 0.6 sec, iso-100

This was little challenge for me to shoot since it wasn't long exposure. I have to make proper jumps within the shorter duration (10 continuous shots).

EXIF: f/8, 1/250 sec, iso-200

The following two photos were really callenger for me, why beacuase I had to standstill/sit without even making a minor movement for 20secs & 13 secs in the cold. It was around 10 degree Celsius with some wind blowing (just before sunrise). And one more difficult things was... the slippery rocks. I even slipped once on the way to my position.  But in the end it was worth. ;)

EXIF: f/22, 20 sec, iso-100

EXIF: f/22, 13 sec, iso-100

EXIF: f/18, 0.6 sec, iso-100

EXIF: f/8, 1/25 sec, iso-100

Father telling a story. Its my elder daughter Maryam with me. I took her to show the wrecked ship 'Lady Rana', which was off-shored few months back.

EXIF: f/22, 2.5 sec, iso-100

And the dream 'selfism' continues....  Hope the information helps some of you out there.