Self Portraits

My final project for my intermediate photography class was the most challenging project; even though we only had to produce 2 good shots rather than 30-40 as has been the norm. The assignment: Self Portraits. The definition: One picture of yourself in an image that captures something about you and reaches into your soul and one picture of inanimate objects that reflects who you are. Easy right?!?!?!?

It took me about five days to figure out what I was going to do. To date we have focused on the technical side of photography and gone over and over concepts like white balance, aperture, shutter speed… I could go on and on. We were tasked week after week in both the intermediate and advanced class with capturing people, places and things and producing images that were in focus, well lit and correctly composed. Now I have to be creative??!??!

I finally came up with a concept: The many sides to Rebecca. I feel like I have all these different “Rebecca’s” … the work Rebecca, the creative Rebecca, the athlete Rebecca, and somewhere deep inside the real deep down and true Rebecca.

Great concept, right, but coming up with something that I could capture on camera was difficult.

For the inanimate object one I chose to use shoes… running shoes, spunky going out shoes and work shoes to reflect the different aspects of me and I chose to put them in a more city type setting… the end result:




For the actual living object one (aka me) I chose to contrast the outgoing side with the business side, so I got dressed up all fancy pants and shoved a book in my face…I also wanted to capture somewhat of the repressed nature I sometimes feel sitting in an office surrounded by a male dominated field all day every day, so I used the same setting as before but played with the shadows a bit (shadows aka bars across the lower half of my body). You be the judge if I lived up to the assignment...



Not sure if you will be able to read the title of the book but it is Prisoner of Birth...

Anyways, class is tonight, so we will see what the final verdict is... great / well executed idea vs crazy