This year, I’ve been trying to take professional self portraits of my little family. I actually made it one of my new years resolutions to be in one professional self portrait (meaning I took it with my big girl camera) each month. I failed that goal pretty much immediately. These were the first “pro-selfies” I took of us and they were from Valentine’s Day.
Each Valentine’s Day, our tradition is to plan out a meal and cook it together. We’ve made pizza from scratch a couple times. One time we just made cookies; I guess we got lazy. This year, we decided to make homemade pasta. We had just bought a hand crank pasta maker and found a great mushroom sauce recipe.
It turns out past is pretty easy to make! Our meal was delicious and we had a lovely Valentine’s Day together. I learned a few important lessons from this attempt at self portraiture:
- I thought I could use my phone as a trigger but the app kept disconnecting from the camera’s wifi, so I used my wireless trigger instead.
- My camera kept turning off so I had to set it to never fall asleep. I thought it would die after being on all night but it hardly drained the battery. Win!
- Setting the trigger to 2 second timer mode made for more natural, less posed, and less awkward photos. (Notice us holding the trigger in the header and the first photo as opposed to the last two images.)
- All the lights in my apartment flicker ever so slightly and in photos, it drives me totally crazy.
- Taking self portraits all night makes everything more annoying but also more fun! And the memories are totally worth it.
Every day is a story. I would love to help you share yours and document all of life’s little moments. Find out more about Storytelling sessions and tell me about your adventure at jamie@jamiekraus.com.
