365 Self Portraits
There are days when I question why I started this 365 Self Portraits project idea. Generally, within a few minutes, I remember why: it was mostly to get better at taking portraits of people in general, and since I'm my most available model, it makes sense. Secondarily it was because I was bored of just taking a daily photo of anything I wanted, I needed a new challenge.
But some days I really have to talk myself into setting up and shooting a self-portrait.
Today is one of those days. It was 8:30 pm, I hadn't taken a self-portrait yet, and I hadn't written a blog post yet. And the honest truth is that I really did not want to do either of them.
But I had committed so I dragged my sorry butt down to my apartment and started to think. And then it came to me (again, for like, the 50th time): a self-portrait doesn't mean I have to take a photo of my face. There are so many ways to interpret self-portraiture from the perspective of art. I could take a photo of my face, another part of me, or even of something that is really meaningful to me, or something that has had a big impact on my life. Really, a self-portrait could be a photo of anything that I feel is intrinsically part of my identity.
For the purposes of my 365 project, I have loosely held myself to the rule that my actual physical person has to at least be partially in the photo since the point of the project is to get better at taking photos of humans, not just things they like.
So, here are the two photos I came up with tonight. I love these socks. Socks like this remind of me my grandpa and of hard work. I wear these socks when I'm going to be outside doing things. Not just laying around. Today we put up the Christmas lights, (before everything gets cold and icy and sketchy), and took the dogs for a really long walk, and I worked on two separate editing projects for a few hours this afternoon. So it's been a productive day for me, and I like to think these socks inspire me to work harder when I wear them.
And then after I took photos of my socks, I wrote this blog post about my socks.
They’re great socks, ok?