Selfies - Showing You Who You Really Aren't

We have all seen the dreadful selfies that our friends send us on Facebook. Horrid things taken with mobile phone cameras - men take them in the bar and women take them in the toilet - and the worst of them squeezed through Instagram or some other filter until they turn brown and fuzzy. The saddest of them are seized by other viewers and batted endlessly around the net. ALL of them are stored somewhere in Langley, Virginia or Beijing or Moscow to bolster some data base or other. Perhaps they make trading cards of them...

Selfies do not need to be bad - they can be rather good evocations of what we look like or who we are. They can also be projections of who we want other people to think we are. Self-promotion is the lifeblood of a lot of industries these days - from dentistry to photography to design bureaux. It is all legal, if a little narcissistic, and if you can stand the shame of it you can put yourself on the back of a bus or the face of the moon quite happily.

Every camera we sell takes selfies - from the compacts through the bridge to the big DSLR's. Any time you see the little symbol for a self timer you can turn the lens on yourself and blaze away. Even if there is no self-timer, there is generally a remote release available that you can trigger off. The better class of compact has a pop-up flash and internal computer power to balance what happens with the main subject and the background - you get a very even sort of exposure. All the big TTL flashes on the DSLR's will do this too.

Beware of the low camera angle that will reveal all your chins - if the flash fires as well you may look like a Hollywood monster. Set the camera to look at you from your eye level and you can't go wrong....actually you can, but if you keep snapping away and deleting the ones that make you look like Gomer Pyle, you will eventually get a good one.

Do not be surprised if the camera sees you in a different way than your bathroom mirror does - your bathroom mirror, and you, see you in reverse. Unless you are taking selfies with a dageurreotype camera you will have to accept the physical evidence as is. Yes, that is your hair. No, it will not look better if you dye it. Yes, that is your body. Yes, it will look better if you diet...

All joking aside - self portraiture has been accepted and welcomed by all art media. For an artist who has made other good things it is a real contribution to future generations - your friends may not care a damn what you look like but someone in 2500 AD may marvel at it!