Everywhere I go I’m creating a profile whether it be friendster or myspace or istockphoto or the HOW design forums, or the… you get the point, they are endless. So, I can never find the right photo to put in that small box they give you. It has to look good small. I want my face to be somewhat recognizable at that size. I want the colors to be vibrant. Or do I want the photo to be black ‘n’ white? Sepia? I don’t know! Too many variables exist in this task of picture picking.

Since I have this great digital camera now, I’m usually the one taking pictures. I have 100s of pictures of my wife and friends, but only a handful of myself, and most of them are not worthy of that little box in the profile. I hunger for, my soul is deficient for the perfectly balanced photo of myself. What treatment can I give it in Photoshop? How much contrast should I add? Why do I drive myself crazy with such a trivial assignment? It’s just a photo. For the love man, get a hold of yourself.

That said, I had a million things running through my head around 3AM this morning—tasks, what to blog about, which emails I need to answer, who do I need to call, what errands do I need to run… When I get like this, the best thing for me is to get up and get myself organized. Get through some of the annoying crap that’s running through my head, and then try and relax.

By this time, I’m up, I’m frustrated because I can’t sleep, I’m still in my boxers, and I begin to fill out my profile on istockphoto.com. And behold… there it is… the “Add a photo” button. So I click browse… with no plans on where I will find this photo, I realize I don’t have a decent photo of myself. I try and make use of the search functionality on my beautiful G5, but end up finding a bunch of old projects that I need to add to my portfolio. So rather than ignore this photo and move on to something productive, I decide it’s Photo shoot time. In an effort to not awaken my wife, I grab the flashlight and head into the bed room closet to grab a button down shirt. While shining the light and rustling around, she of course awakens and says, “what are you doing.” I reply, “getting a shirt.” No telling what she was thinking as I throw one arm through the fitted Express shirt while swapping the flashlight to the other hand and stepping over the dog gate as I head out of the room quickly.

I still want to be quiet, so I grab the camera and the tripod and I head to the garage. I realize I need light, so I go and grab the lamp from my office and from the living room. I want a nice white backdrop so I can later cut out the background behind me without too much trouble and replace it with geometric shapes or other random Photoshop techniques. The white background assists in defining the edges of the subject in the photo by not creating any other distractions. So I tack up a sheet, set up the lamps, put the camera on a timer and run in front of it and wait for the click. I repeated the timer, run, wait scenario about 45 times until I felt I had a few good photos, imported them into iPhoto, tweaked and cropped a few in Photoshop, and I’ve posted the results for you below.

Behold, decent profile photos. I can’t wait to browse to my new photos when I need one. Oh, and feel free to use these if you need a decent picture of me for anything. (adding a mustache, putting my head on a bodybuilder…)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 10:19 am and is filed under Pleasure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.