Saturday, 4th August, 2007

Dressing Up

photo tranny selfportrait

Apologies for yesterday I personally thought it was hilarious — but hey, I'm never a good judge of that sort of thing.

Yesterday, after giving a very quick guided tour of Lancaster to my colleague who had finally gotten around to visiting me (I'd only been inviting her for three years, to be fair to her), I thought I'd capitalise on (a) the sunshine, and (b) the little discovery I made the other day, that I get really good light if I stand by my bedroom window.

OK, so the sunshine vanished pretty sharpish, but still.

The thing is though, as much as I quite like those recent shots of me with my cheeseplant sticking out of my head, I've been thinking that I really should try and put a bit more effort into this endless stream of self-portraits.

Transvestites — when it comes to photography at least (although you could probably argue that it spreads into every aspect of our lives) — tend to have tunnel vision, I feel. Not every one of us (natch), just in a Wild And Sweeping Generalisation Kinda Way™.

In the vast majority of the self-portrait-snapshots I see online, you can tell that the most amount of effort went into the person stood in the middle of the shot — and that very little was considered about the background. Now, obviously, I've wittered on about this for ages, so I'll stop myself from being too tedious (for a change).

Anyways. My point being that I'm as guilty of it as anyone else. I get far too wrapped up in trying to make myself look vaguely pretty, pulling the right face, and tilting my head at just the right angle, that I spend pretty much no time whatsoever thinking about what's behind me.

True, recently I've been taking things off the walls so that I get a plain white background, but a lot of the time that means that my photos are far too samey — same pose, same outfit, same ridiculous amount of white giving no edge to the photograph. In some cases, that's actually worked really well. But I keep thinking to myself that I need a dark background to a lot of my shots.

So after I'd done a few things around the house, I trotted off to my local fabric shop, picked up a couple of metres of black cloth, some clothespegs and some string, and rigged up a very Heath Robinson-esque photo studio in the corner of my bedroom.

Then spent most of the evening trying on shitloads of clothes

I'm rather pleased with them, to be honest The maid outfit I'm not so sure about, obviously. But the ones where I wore that massive petticoat as a kind of 'babydoll' thing came out well.

Some are (natch) Photoshoped as usual, but some are straight out of the camera (apart from where I've clone-stamped out the crease in the cloth that I really should have ironed first).

...

There are a few more that I might do something with later on, but I think I'm in danger of slightly overdoing the whole 'upload' thing at the moment.

Well, you see, the thing with the maid one is that it's just not (IMO) such a great shot. For a start, I couldn't get the whole thing into the viewfinder, the lighting on my face is all wrong, and, well, I dunno — I just can't quite seem to pull that one off

And also, while I absoloutely love the thing, the 'braces' over my shoulders seem to make them even more 'squarish' than they normally are.

I'll get it one day

The two B&W corset ones BTW, I don't suppose anyone wants a desktop picture based on the profile one do they?

(2560x1600 px)

No, that would be ridiculous, and quite probably narcisssistic Siobhan...

your posts over the last few days speak of an interesting little head journey

Hmm, yes, but I don't think that the head-journey is reflected totally in the recent posts. The "fuck off" one from yesterday really was just me thinking "Heh, that's a bit funny" — the result of an experiment to push myself out of my normal 3/4-from-the-left-profile that I always seem to resort to.

I mean, frankly, I've been deeply frustrated over the past five (or so) days — but not because of anything photographic, more a sense of frustration at myself for being quite so 'limiting' in my tastes, and restrictive in my availabilities.

...

Which probably makes no sense, giving me the excuse to spend several more weeks mulling it all over in my head

...

For the record, BTW, my favourite is the first one. I know it's not the most 'feminine' out of them all, and I've got that pointy-nosed-starey-thing going on that's not exactly flattering, but it's the way I decided to not try and hide the camera-remote like I normally do, and was quite blatant about it.

"Tranny in the process of trying to photograph herself, and really rather enjoying it all", or something.

manic

Bingo — pefect word That is what I look like when I'm happy though

shocking pink bob

Interesting. It's been a while since I did anything other than use my own hair. I guess I've had this "I've spent 3 years growing it, I'll be dammed if I'm going to wear a wig" thing going on.

Might give it a go later...

[sic]

I don't mean later today...

Hmm, well I just used the light coming through my window (apart from some of the later, yellower shows). This looks like some vaguely interesting stuff about black backgrounds and lighting, in particular:

It's all a matter of relative distances. The exposure of any object (ignoring object color) is determined by the ratio of light-to-subject versus subject to camera [...] If you're light is 4' from the subject, the subject is 4' from you, and the background is 5.6' from you, then the background will be underexposed one stop. If the background is 8' (and the subject still 4'), 2 stops.

To be honest, you can probably tell that this was a 'first attempt' considering that there are some creases in the backgrounds, and it's not a solid black — in fact, you can see the texture of the cloth in quite a lot of them

Actually, I read that more as being another "fuck off" one with you using the remote to switch us off

Interesting, isn't it, the difference between intent and perceived intent? I was quite chuffed with that picture, I felt it was staunchly 'defiant' yet deeply proud — a kind of "Fuck off, I'm a tranny, so what?" thing going on.

Mother Of London

link warrenellis fashion

You know, you pride yourself in your photographic work, and then you see something by a proper photographer, and you're just absolutely completely awestruck — [warrenellis.com]

It's OK Paula — you can say "fuck" on my blog.

I think I had a general impression in my head of "people who don;t like my way of life" when I posted it.

*cringe*