My first week in quarantine has been challenging to say the least. I have discovered new small characteristics about myself, like how easily entertained I am by counting the bumps on my popcorn ceiling or how many sunny-side up eggs I can eat before their smell on a skillet sickens me which as of now stands at about five.
Most of the time I find it easy to humor myself while I’m alone, but today was different. I had already done what I planned on doing (Italian lessons and working out) for an entire day in about an hour, and, after pacing around my house for a few minutes thinking of something I could do to pass the time, I got a Snapchat from one of my friends showing me her attempting a a self-portrait photoshoot. I immediately loved the idea, so I grabbed my camera, tripod and diffuser and began to gather my equipment.
I placed my three-bulb lamp to the right of my face with my diffuser hanging on the top of the light by its handle so I could soften the harsh shadows caused by illuminating my face so close to the light. I positioned my tripod next to the makeshift studio setup, raised it a little shorter than myself and positioned the camera upward to create a more interesting angle. I set it to a 10-second self-timer that would burst ten photos so I could have time to model and attempt several poses before having to start over.
I spent the majority of my time merely trying to get my entire face in frame, which was my biggest challenge because I couldn’t look through my viewfinder, and I wasn’t able to see what part of me was cut off. In order to combat this, I had to put my camera bag as a placeholder for myself so I could adjust my body position accordingly.
My poses mostly consisted of me messing with my hair because my natural mullet is starting to grow in, which is unflattering. I had to cover it, and playing with my hair was the best way to do that while still looking comfortable in front of the camera. I decided to make stern facial expressions to match the serious tone of the high contrast and warm background colors.
When I was finished shooting, I narrowed the 300 photos I took to one of me looking directly into the camera with both of my hands running through my hair, creating harsh shadows on both sides of my face. I decided to edit in Photoshop instead of Lightroom because I knew I wanted to experiment with some portrait editing techniques that I’m not familiar with in Photoshop. The method I learned to use was putting a Gaussian blur filter on my face to remove hyper-pigmentation in my skin. Learning and playing around with this extra step added another hour and a half to my editing time, and in retrospect I went a little too heavy with the filter, which made my skin look almost plastic.
I’ll probably continue to use photography as a way to alleviate my boredom during quarantine, and as of now I am perfectly OK with living in constant fear that I got COVID-19 from the True/False Film Festival a couple weeks ago. Hopefully I can continue to occupy myself alone for another 20 days, but I might come out of this completely forgetting how to interact with people other than my parents and siblings.
How did you spend your fifth day of social distancing? Let us know in the comments below.
