Do It Yourself
fashion + cosplay for the phone-stricken; or
how to take better selfies
This is a work in progress.
Do It Yourself is a short, work-in-progress guide on self-portraiture using your smartphone. I'm putting up this temporary teaser to give my links somewhere to land, and to explain my process before I am ready to show its results.
Here's a simple breakdown of the progression.
- Confronting the App
Your camera app has a lot of processing features that try to compensate for the limitations of that tiny, fingerprint-covered camera in the corner of your phone. These often work pretty well for pictures of things--a nice view, or that lunch you just ate. They make for awful portraits, though. For the best pictures of yourself, you're going to have to change some settings. - Fields of View
Your phone camera has a wide angle of view--it takes in a lot of what's in front of it. This causes some (often unintuitive) problems with perspective. Where do you put your phone, exactly, when you want a nice, normal-looking picture of yourself? How do you think about perspective when you want to use it to your advantage? - How to Think About Lighting
You need more of it--that's as simple as I could be--but how much more, and from where? Light has properties that might not seem obvious until you start to think about them: color, diffusion, directionality... These properties could easily make or break any photograph, and with smartphone cameras, you have to be doubly careful. - Approachable Editing
If there were any single, significant change that would improve the selfie-taking skills of most people I meet, it would be editing. If you care about quality, take the time to edit your pictures. In this section I am attempting to break down--as simply as I possibly can--a basic editing workflow, on your phone, using a freely available app called Snapseed. - Top Ten Tips for Composition
This one isn't actually a top-ten list. It does talk about composition, though, and tries to break those ideas down beyond the advice you're likely to receive elsewhere. Composition is not a set of tips or rules. If anything, it's a set of abstract ideas that connect with each other. I think that's what makes it so hard to talk about meaningfully.
I am currently working on an as-simple-as-possible-but-still-useful version of this guide where each of these sections fits onto one page. I know it will take a long time for me for truly finish this project. I'd like to have something helpful published before then.
I have another guide, also in-progress, called Photography For the Forgetful. That guide focuses more on the technical aspects of photography and is more so for those who have dedicated cameras and want to learn photography as a skill they can use to photograph others. Do It Yourself is more about selfies.