From 2009


I’m not sure if this is particularly funny anymore, but it was when I shot it.

I think. There was a minor swine flu outbreak in the Pacific rim and a lot of people were wearing masks. In retrospect, it would have been a good time to lay in a supply.

Self portrait (2009)

It’s hard to assess how lighting is going to come out when you’re shooting yourself, and that particularly matters when you’ve got things (like my glasses) that you want to catch a reflection. To do this, I have a microphone stand with an easy raise/lower release, and it actually has one of those old school radio mics on it  (the slotted pot metal housings) – I can position the mic and get the reflections right on it, then put my head right where it was, match the angle, and lower the mic. From there it’s a matter of feeding the camera a dozen or two images with slight variations and picking the best one.

Comments

  1. Reginald Selkirk says

    It’s hard to assess how lighting is going to come out when you’re shooting yourself

    This should be way easier in the digital age. You could set up a nice big monitor where you can see it.

  2. jrkrideau says

    There was a minor swine flu outbreak in the Pacific rim</b
    From wiki
    Swine Flu
    The number of confirmed cases was approximately 1.6 million. However, some studies estimated that the actual number could be 700 million to 1.4 billion people….
    ———–
    The number of lab-confirmed deaths reported to the WHO is 18,449, though this 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic is estimated to have actually caused about 284,000 (range from 150,000 to 575,000) deaths.

  3. says

    Reginald Selkirk@#1:
    You could set up a nice big monitor where you can see it.

    I used to use a data projector hooked to a laptop, to project images as I took them. Consequently I ended up with pictures of models all staring fixedly at a specific far-away point in space.

  4. says

    I’m not sure if this is particularly funny anymore, but it was when I shot it.

    I do think it is funny. Nowadays I see lots of homemade masks here, and yours is rather lovely.

  5. sonofrojblake says

    File under “now I’ve seen it all”: today on my monthly supermarket trip I saw a man in a surgical mask. A tactical surgical mask, DPM in case he needed to do surgery in an enemy forest environment.

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