selfie saturday

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The Beard

For whatever reason there's been a spate of articles published on the Internets about digital camera self portraits, or selfies, and What It All Means. There is in particular a recent essay published on Luminous Landscape (LuLa to those of us In The Know) titled "The Age of Narcissism – Digitized, Homogenized." It's the kind of essay I might have been assigned in a freshman college English course. It's an earnest attempt to show how narcissistic we've become in this digital domain, aided and abetted by the twin devil spawn of Facebook and Instagram. So here's my nominal addition this culture's "narcissistic pandemic." If there's any saving grace to these photos, it's that they aren't on Facebook and they haven't been produced by Instagram.

Self Portrait - First Light 20mm
Self Portrait #1 (7/365)

Technical

Produced over the years with Olympus Pens. The top was produced with the Olympus E-PL2 and the Panasonic Leica 25mm, the middle with the Olympus E-P2 and the Panasonic Lumix 20mm, and the bottom with the Olympus E-P2, a ยต4:3rds to OM adapter and an OM 1.4/50mm. All post processed in Lightroom and Silver Efext Pro for the black and white images.

Comments

  1. Wolfgang LonienApril 14, 2013

    Yup, seen them all, but still they're good. Kirk Tuck wrote lately that taking a good self portrait is anything but easy, and I think he's right. I can make a dramatic one where I look like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now if it fits my current mood, but to have one which really shows you as a person and a whole isn't exactly easy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. BillApril 14, 2013

      Thanks for the complement. Kirk's selfie is of a more classic nature, with proper lighting in a studio setting, and that kind of technique layers on even more difficulty. I won't even try to "compete" with him. But I do try to create images where I'm not pursing my lips together, or have a BFF in the same frame.

      If there's anyone who's going to look like COL Kurtz (Marlon Brando) that would be me. All I have to do is loose the rest of my thinning hair, take off the glasses and I'm your man.

      Delete
  2. Matthew RobertsonApril 14, 2013

    I did enjoy that LL article. I can just imagine two people meeting on the street:

    "Hi! I'm a photographer who reads Black And White Fine Art magazines and uses a micro-shimmed Medium Format Digital back in a camera on a seventeen-hundred-dollar Arca Swiss Cube geared tripod head."

    'Cool! I like to take photos of myself with a cellphone and share them with my friends.'

    "Narcissist!"

    ReplyDelete

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