I’m a fairly novice photographer – I’ve taken hundreds of photos (food, landscape, selfies, etc) but never really tried to challenged myself to improve my skills. So, in order to actually challenge myself and improve I’m trying the 52 frames challenge for 2020.

The first challenge topic for the year was ‘Self Portrait’. This was apparently the first challenge when they started 52 frames years so it’s kind of cool they’ve kept coming back to it. That said, it’s also pretty intimidating! Both in terms of photographing yourself and as a starting point for the challenge.

I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a selfie so I wanted other things going on in this photo – texture, light, shadow, depth, and so on. I’ve also never really done much low light photography, relying on post-processing to get the effect I wanted, so I wanted to avoid that here, changing the environment to get the photo I wanted, instead of changing the photo.

Reds and blacks are some of my favourite colours/shades to play around with, and so seemed fitting to go with a self portrait. To get this I basically built a fort out of dressing gowns and blankets, held tenuously together by clothes pegs and hair ties. Apart from that it was shot in my room, on a fujifilm x-t100, with the curtains drawn and the door to the ensuite cracked to let a sliver of warm yellow light through.

I did no post-processing or editing on this, so this is raw off the camera. I wanted it to just be me as captured, no filters or fancy edits.

‘Red’ Wednesday 1st January, 2020

You can find me on the 52 frames site at https://52frames.com/photographer/clairehereandthere