selfportrait

Stop Motion: Artist Depicts Aging, Death and Reincarnation Using Face Paint

When you hear that a stop motion video depicts the process of aging, death and reincarnation, your mind probably goes straight to digital manipulation. After all, how else do you make someone look older? Or dead for that matter?

But London-based makeup artist Emma Allen didn't use Photoshop to create her video "Ruby," she used face paint instead.

Raitanen Bacteriogram 1

Photographer Erno-Erik Raitanen Creates ‘Self-Portraits’ Using His Own Bacteria

Colorful and unusual patterns pictures are what photographer Erno-Erik Raitanen calls self-portraits. The pictures, which Raitanen says are more like photograms, involve no camera, some photographic film, and bacteria.

The series, called Bacteriograms, is a display of Raitanen's own body bacteria cultivated on the gelatin surface of film negatives, much like bacteria is grown in Petri dishes in a laboratory setting.

KeyProp: The Smartphone Stand That’s Always There When You Need It

For those of you who often take pictures with your smartphone, but find that you never have a stand or tripod with you when you need one, here's a creative Kickstarter that may solve that problem. Called KeyProp, this ingenious little key shaped smartphone stand fits on your key chain so you always have it with you -- and it comes with a free camera timer/clap-to-snap app to boot.

Close Call: Reporter’s Selfie Reveals That a Baseball Whizzed By Her Head

Sun Sports Rays reporter Kelly Nash recently snapped some selfies atop the Green Monster, the tall left field wall in Fenway Park (home to the Boston Red Sox baseball team). Afterward, while reviewing the photos, Nash discovered the image above: it reveals that a speeding baseball whizzed by Nash, nearly slamming into her head.

Curiosity Rover Beams Down Stunning Self-Portrait Panorama from Mars

When the Mars Rover Opportunity was nearing its 9th year in the Martian sun, we shared a beautiful panoramic landscape shot of the red planet taken by the aging rover. It makes sense then that Curiosity would eventually send down a panorama of its own. But just like you would expect from a younger generation of rover, it couldn't help but make the pano a selfie.

Photographer Trying to Take The World’s Largest Self-Portrait Camera on the Road

The IMAGO1:1 is the largest life-size self-portrait camera in the world. Exposing beautiful black and white self-portraits on 2ft x 6.5ft silver gelatin photo paper, it's a photographic marvel that is currently housed and used in an art gallery in Berlin.

Susanna Kraus, daughter of IMAGO1:1 co-inventor Werner Kraus, now runs the camera, taking photos for clients and exhibitions alike. But her dream is to respond to the many requests she gets from all over the world by taking the IMAGO1:1 on the road -- for that, she needs your help.

Vincent Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait Turned Into a Photograph

What would Vincent van Gogh's work look like if he had been a photographer instead of a master painter? Would he have created his self-portraits using a camera instead of a brush?

Photographer Tadao Cern recently created an interesting image that explores this question. He took one of the artist's most famous self-portraits and using Photoshoppery to recreate it as a still photo.

How to Create a Surreal Self-Portrait That Shows You Holding Yourself

Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a photograph of you holding yourself up. I hope it will give you a good idea of how I create this type of image so that you can create a similar image yourself! Obviously, this is not the only way to create this type of image, but it is the way I have found most believable, as the connection between the two subjects actually occurs in real life. Enjoy!

Mind-Bending Reflection Portraits Shot Using a Wet Plate Camera

Last week we issued a challenge asking readers to shoot a creative mirror self-portrait using an alternative style of photography. Reader Agustin Barrutia took us up on that challenge, and created a pair of wet plate photographs that take the concept of "mirror self-portrait" to a new level (they're unlike anything we've seen before). Both photographs are straight-out-of-camera wet plate photos that weren't manipulated digitally. Barrutia simply used "mirrors" (one doesn't involve a mirror, per se) and "reflections" in clever ways.

The wet plate above is a self-portrait of Barrutia shooting the wet plate. That camera in the frame is the camera that captured the wet plate.

Mirror Self-Portrait Captured Using a Wet Plate Camera

Yesterday we shared an old school mirror self-portrait from 1917, captured by a young Australian fight pilot named Thomas Baker on a Kodak camera. After seeing that image, photographer Sam Cornwell decided to shoot his own old-school mirror selfie... using a 12x15-inch wet plate camera!

A Mirror Self-Portrait Captured in 1917

Snapping mirror self-portraits may have gotten a huge boost from the introduction of digital photography and smartphoneography, but it is by no means a new activity limited to our era. The photograph above was created back in 1917 -- nearly 100 years ago! It was snapped by an Australian flying ace named Thomas Baker when he was 20 years old.

An Arm’s-Length Self-Portrait Captured Millions of Miles Away

Facebook users here on Earth aren't the only ones shooting arm's-length self-portraits: NASA's Curiosity rover over on Mars is doing it as well! Curiosity captured the image above a couple of days ago using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), which is attached to an extendable robotic arm. The image is actually a composite of 55 separate photos shot using the 2-megapixel RGB color CCD camera.

Jump Man: An Amazing Self-Portrait-A-Day Video Five Years in the Making

After the viral success of Noah Kalina's self-portrait-a-day video everyday, there has been no shortage of people copying the idea and creating their own versions of the project. However, not many come close to the awesomeness and creativity of the video above, created by a guy named Mike (Thisnomyp on YouTube).

Almost exactly one year after Kalina's video hit the web, Mike began taking one self-portrait each day, starting on August 25, 2007. Five years later, this past weekend, Mike was able to compile all the photos into the video seen above, titled "Jump Man."

Self-Portrait Machine Turns Your Hand Into a Photo Printer

"Blind Self-Portrait" is a project by artists Kyle McDonald and Matt Mets that's based around a machine that can help you turn photographs into sketches. The machine constantly track's the subject's face using a camera and translates the image into a line-drawing and x- and y-coordinates. The user then rests their hand on the machine's "hand" and presses a pen into a piece of paper. The robot hand does the rest of the work, guiding the hand into drawing the photograph as the person sits back and watches the magic happen.

Creative 365-Day Self-Portrait Project by a 17-Year-Old Photographer

Last October, Portland-based 17-year-old photographer Brendon Burton began an ambitious project in which he committed to creating one self-portrait every day for a year. Now, half a year later, Burton is still going strong and his Flickr photostream is full of beautiful and creative images that document his development as a photographer.

A Revolving Self Portrait Created in 1865

Here's a revolving self-portrait created back in 1865 by French photographer Félix Nadar (real name Gaspard-Félix Tournachon). Nadar was the first person in history to take aerial photographs (he was a balloonist) and was one of the pioneers of artificial lighting (he photographed in the catacombs of Paris).

Bathtub Self-Portraits in Bizarre Locations

Japanese photographer Mariko Sakaguchi has a curious self-portrait series in which she photographs herself sitting in a bathtub in all kinds of random locations, which range from business offices to lecture halls.

Composite Self-Portrait Made Using 500 Photographs of One Face

Inspired by Noah Kalina's viral everyday video a girl who goes by clickflashwhirr has been doing a similar self-portrait-a-day project. Designer Tiemen Rapati decided to make a composite image showing what the average of the self-portraits looks like. Taking 500 images from clickflashwhirr's Flickr set, Rapati wrote a script that counts the individual RGB values for each pixel, averaging them across the 500 portraits.

Start a Self Portrait per Day Project with New Everyday App

After Noah Kalina published his "Everyday" video back in 2006 featuring a self-portrait a taken every day for 2,356 days, the concept took off and soon the Internet was filled with copycat projects by people who wanted to document their own lives in the same way. If you've been wanting to try you hand at taking a photo of your face every day but have lacked the discipline to do so, there's a new app for the iPhone called "Everyday" that is designed to make things easier for you.