During the process of building this blog, one of my good friends from NYC came to visit me down here in the Low Country. I had mentioned to her about Sea Salt & Sass and discussed the various things that I needed to build upon (after doing hours of research on successful blogs and what to do and what NOT to do). This ended up, eventually, moseying its way to picture taking. One of the big things I’m going to try to do is recreate all my own photos in this blog (mostly to not get in trouble legally if it comes to that). This then led to a discussion on …
How the hell does one pose for their own photos?
Especially when I can count the number of selfies/individual photos of myself on two hands.
So in the quest of taking a ton of nice new photographs the two of us spent her weekend down here dressing up and wandering the historic street of downtown Charleston to find awesome backgrounds to practice our poses in.
We probably looked ridiculous to anyone who wandered past us while we posed and talked to one another on where to place our hands and bags and how to brace or separate our legs. In fact when I was standing up from one of the pictures I took, I hit my head on a low lying branch. Lots of fun and cursing involved there.
In this discovery of learning how to photo pose, one thing that surprised me was the sheer amount of photos we took. Over the span of three days it had to have been near a 1,000 pics. And the photos that came out the best was when we weren’t paying attention and doing small shifts or were walking towards each other thinking the photo taking was done or just laughing at each other over our absurdity. This was when we learned that even when trying to do a purposeful pose to do a slow movement into it to make it look like it was unintended or natural (those are the ones that come out best).
Now there are angles and body motions and twists that work well and the only way to find out how they look on you is to do multiple different stances on a 360 view of your body – because not everyone’s the same. For some bizarre reason my right side is better than my left and for someone else’s it might be their left side or their front, etc.
This is where that sheer amount of photo taking comes in – while we scrolled through them and noted the ones we really liked, we took into account how we were holding ourselves, how our legs were positioned, the angle of our heads, etc. Some of the forced poses we did came from YouTube videos we watched – mostly to get a baseline on what we were supposed to do with our hands instead of flailing them around.
After doing this a few times we then went into our next scene and practiced those poses that we liked in the prior photos.
The only downside of this whole first run of our fashion photoshoot was the fact the sun decided to be a pain and stay behind grey clouds and be murky all weekend so we didn’t get a great amount of natural light (or light in general).
On the plus side though – my mother is going to be really happy with me since I’m now taking photos for this blog and thus need to always dress nice, with makeup and jewelry on, in case a photo opportunity arises. It’s only taken 28 years for me to get to this point so I guess I’m glad I started this blog to make me be an actual adult instead of living in the sweats I’ve had since sophomore year of college.
But this was a great start in understanding how people take photos, how to position yourself, how to angle the camera, and how to keep your eyes peeled for great scenes to take your photos.
The below are some of the editing apps I use (and have subsequently fallen in love with):
- Quickshot: This is the editing app I use the most – once I’m done here I’ll sometimes go into Instagram and use another filter on top of my edits, but for the most part this one takes care if it all. There’s also a feature where you can make the sky blue if it’s grey – and the best part of all IT’S FREE!
- Word Swag: I LOVE THIS APP! Quite frankly, I’m obsessed. After I edit my photos, I go into this and add any words I want. I had so much fun putting the words ‘The Charleston Scene’ above most of the pic we took that weekend, and I also find it’s awesome for writing quotes to post on the Instagram page. This App isn’t free, unfortunately, but it is only around ~$5 a month. Totally worth it in my opinion since I’m on it constantly – and having a TON of fun doing so.
- Instagram: I mean – who doesn’t use this for photo editing?