This post came about because I honestly just wanted to use
my new tripod somehow, but everything kind of went to shit when
my shutter remote (which I highly recommend if you have a camera without infrared capabilities, I think I just need a new battery) stopped working. So I kind of taught myself how to make the best of the self-timer on
my camera, plus continuous shooting, which on my camera can take up to 10 consecutive shots. I learned a few random things along the way, so I'll use these awkward scarf photos to talk about it.
The self timer on a camera is a huge pain in the ass. Maybe it's just my camera, but it was really hard to get the focus right without a subject in the frame because the subject was me, who was trying to focus the nonexistent subject. Catch 22/Inception kind of? So what I had to do was take the photos more close up, rather than far away (I realize I could have put a chair where I would have been standing and focused on that, but it was all very in the moment), and focus myself at an arm's length.
Another thing that I learned was that continuous shooting of ten frames gives you just about enough time to move your body into three different positions. The pictures in between the first, middle, and last will be blurry, but the others should be focused if you're quick. Again, with the shutter remote this would be simpler, but obviously not everyone has/wants a shutter remote, so this is a doable alternative.
I wish I saved some of the awkward in between shots (the one above is kind of awkward because of me and my face, not the camera, so there you go), but I kind of deleted things as I went so I wouldn't have hundreds of photos to import onto my computer, but I promise, there were at least a hundred blurry shots for the maybe 20 focused ones I got (out of which maybe three or four were actually what I was looking to capture).
So basically, if you're looking to take photos of yourself with a tripod, and you don't have a working shutter remote, and no one is around, you can. It's a production for sure, but coming from someone who really doesn't know much about their DSLR, it's doable and actually kind of fun once you get the hang of it.
I have had this idea forever, pretty much since I cleaned my room back in 2012 when I moved back home after college (I have cleaned it since then, promise), and threw out a bunch of weird photo stands that I got from sweet sixteens and bat mitzvahs over the years. I wanted ones that actually looked cute, and then when I started the spray painting frenzy of '13, and bought a million little plastic elephants (exhibit a), I knew I had to combine the two ideas.
This project was actually super easy. All I used was spray paint, 20-gauge wire, plastic elephants (you can obviously use whatever animal you want), alligator clips, super glue, and a drill with 1/16 bit.
Spray paint the plastic animal, and when dry, drill a hole into its back. Cut the wire (I did it by eye, it's somewhere between 2-3") and super glue one end of the wire to an alligator clip (I colored my alligator clip in with a gold paint pen so that it matched the gold of everything else). When that was fully dry, I glued the other end of the wire into the elephant's back, and held it for a minute until it was sturdy enough to dry standing up on its own.
Between everything drying and setting and whatever else, this took me about an hour. I made two, then broke out my polaroid camera and shot a photo of Lucas and a selfie, just to put something in them for now. I love the way they turned out, and feel like it's an easy gift idea as it can be customized with any animal or figure depending on who it is. Voilà.
