Jan 21

Jan 21, originally uploaded by hezro.

So I'm going to be a little wordy, which I suppose is nothing new. But usually I sort of stumble onto being wordy and never actually intend to be. Oh my...now I'm being wordy about being wordy.

Anyway, I'm working on a web site for Heather Engen Photography and you may have noticed that I've rolled my blog into that.  So I wanted to make a new header, which reflected this change and made mention of Heather Engen Photography.

In the meantime, at the start of the month I decided to once again, try to participate in Jan's Focus 52 project over at Two Scoopz. I read the prompt for the second week, "I am ____", and I decided a new self-portrait would fit the bill.  Plus I wanted to redo my blog header anyway so I could kill two birds with one stone.

So there you go - that was my wordy way of introducing this photo. This shot was taken while I was still testing the light and actually, I decided that I would rather have two catch lights so I changed the lights around after this set up.  By the time I got everything set the way I wanted it, I'm holding a camera in every single on of those pictures.  In retrospect, I should have taken a few sans camera but I guess I was very focused on the task at hand.  (Look up at the new blog header and you can see one of the pictures from my final lighting scheme.)

Naturally I hated pretty much every single photo I took - including this one. It's strange because I used to be fine with photos of myself but it's been several years since I've had a picture that I like.  There's something in particular about this photo that I'm extremely self-conscious about. Perhaps (hopefully?) others wouldn't even notice it - because of course to others this is just how I look.  (Actually, most people would probably say this is a big improvement because my hair is actually combed and I'm wearing make-up!)  But I look at this photo and that one thing I don't like literally jumps out at me.  It's pretty much all I can see.  I don't want to tell you what it is, either, because I don't want to draw your attention to it...but I suspect it might not be the first "flaw" others would notice. Of course, I don't want to open it up for guessing either because then I might get self-conscious about some new thing(s). Yikes! Anyway, point is, I took quite a few photos and there were very few that I thought were even passable. So...this is a reminder to myself to be understanding when taking photos for other grown-ups because they might have similar peculiarities. :)  When it comes to pictures of ourselves, I think we care a lot less about technical proficiency than we do downplaying all of our "defects".

Moving on, we had an ice storm that day so while *I* was inside taking photos, the kids were out sledding on the ice.  My father-in-law gave us these great sleds which are perfect for these conditions. The kids had a lot of fun with them. (And clearly I did manage to sneak outside for a few minutes.)