Sunday Stills Challenge - Self Portrait

This week's Sunday Stills Challenge is Self Portrait. I'm still a little up in the air about this one since I have not posted any real pics of myself on this blog yet. There are a couple pics that show my reflection, but that is it. It's kind of nice to maintain a certain amount of anonymity. But at the same time, it might be fun to open those flood gates. There are certainly plenty of pictures that I have thought about posting but didn't because there was someone in them.

On a side note: does that make me a bad mom since I consider my animals my children and freely post pictures of them every where?!?

Anyways, once I read what the challenge was this week the first thing I did was google "self portrait". I wanted to find a definition of it to see what I could do to still take the challenge, but not put a head shot up. Self portrait is defined as a picture of oneself taken by oneself. Well, that sounds like something I can work with. The only request in the challenge was that there wasn't a camera in front of your face and no pics from the archives. I guess it does imply that it should be a head shot, but it doesn't say that it needs to be a full on face shot.

Doing some more googling on self portrait tips, there were hints and tips for taking them, ways to make them interesting and then I found this interesting webpage. In reading thru it, I found the words I was looking for..."A self-portrait doesn't have to be of your face..." Yes! My get out of jail free card! :-)

So this week I've tried to get some interesting self portraits. I've tried some different ideas and this is what I've come up with...

I tried the shadow across the ground. Cheyanne was helping me take pictures so that lump by my leg is her.

Then I tried the barn wall.

Again, Cheyanne had to help me.

Then Mister decided to join the party too.

Then I convinced Midori to stop playing with the lens cap long enough to snap a pic...yep, that's me with the totally cheesy grin reflected in Midori's eye ball.

Then I tried doing just part of my face, zoomed in on my eye. I like it that you can see the trees and sun reflected in my eye on this one.

These were actually my first attempts at the self portrait when I was still debating whether or not to post an actual picture of myself. I decided eh, what the heck...

I just balanced the camera on the back of the couch, turned all the lights off in the house and used the flash and macro setting. The portrait setting wouldn't focus so close. Then I used the 2 second delay so I could get both my arms in the picture and voila!

There were plenty of pictures of me smiling, but for some reason I liked these serious ones better. No clue why.

So there we have it. I opened those flood gates. Not sure if I will continue to post pictures of me or not, but those are my self portraits.