Long Exposure Self Portrait Tutorial

Self portraits should not be limited to just opening your phone’s front camera and snapping a selfie. If you’re creative and patient enough, you can get some interesting results even by taking your own photos. You might want to try this out if you’re experimenting with some new tricks and techniques, and you want to be sure before hiring a model. Photographer Mike takes the concept of snapping a self portrait a step further by capturing some long exposure self portraits. And as you’ll see, the results are quite amazing:

A self portrait will not be interesting enough if you just have yourself in front of the camera. Where’s the fun in that? The idea is thus to create interest by using long exposure and capturing the motion in your surrounding while you stay as still as possible.

As Mike demonstrates in this video, he has his setup on a walkway beside a train track. As the sun goes down, it lets him open the shutter for a longer period of time that in turns allows him to use a slower shutter speed and capture the light trail left by the train. With the camera set to shoot at f/5.6, shutter speed of 2.5s, and ISO 500, he is then able to capture a self portrait with a lot of drama going around in the background.

The only catch when doing such of photography is that you need to remain very still. But again, if you are creative enough, you can still create an interesting looking self portrait while you yourself have some motion blur.

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