Self Portraits in Utah
CAPTION FOR THE VIDEO ABOVE:
Hiii! This is the last week of these weekly posts, can you believe it? I kindof can’t to be honest, it’s here already. So this week I’m sharing a self portrait set that I took in the summer of 2019 during my cross country road trip, I have so many to share from there. This I took outside of Grand Staircase Escalante in Utah. Most of the self portrait sets that I took on my cross country road trip were in Utah because I spent all of June in Utah basically because I fucking love Utah. So I was outside of Grand Staircase Escalante and I was parked on the side of a dirt road, that I honestly don’t know where it went, I don’t know where the dirt road would have taken me to if I had driven the whole way. I was basically just parked on the side of a dirt road and taking photos behind my van, and don’t be startled please, hopefully, I hope I don’t scare you but HERE’S YOUR WARNING, in the BTS video for this photoset I think at the end of both of them, because I had to do 2 videos for it because cars kept driving by and I kept getting spooked and having to grab my phone and hide behind my van because I really thought I was alone but occasionally I wasn’t so yeah uhm I hope you’re not too startled when I grab the phone and run when I was taking these videos. To me its pretty funny, I hope you think it’s funny too. I have one of those sticker phone protector things on my cell phone and this is the same phone that I had when I was on my trip and I still have Utah dirt under some of the sticker on my phone because of this. When I was taking self portraits I took them with a digital camera because it has an interval timer and I could do self portraits way faster and take way more in a shorter amount of time than I could do with film. So I had my digital camera on a tripod a cute little mini tripod with these movable leg things where I would attach my phone on the top of the camera, so I would have like digital camera, cell phone. When I had to grab the camera, I would grab the whole camera and tripod, and when I grabbed the camera/tripod because I was trying to hide to make sure nobody saw me naked out in the middle of nowhere, my cell phone that was on top of the camera had fallen off of the camera because it wasn’t super securely attached, so I would grab my stuff and run and my phone would drop and I was like “oh shit.” I just think it’s funny, so you get to experience that in video form from the perspective of my cell phone camera, I hope you enjoy.
First look has access now to the self portrait double exposures that I took in June of 2020, this is one of the few photosets that I took. I had a roll of film that I took during my cross country road trip that was from Dead Horse Point State Park which is one of my favorite places in the world that I’ve been to, several times now because it’s incredible. That’s where the landscape part of it is from, the self portrait part was here at my house in June of 2020 in my makeshift studio, which is my black blanket draped over the couch that’s in front of the window in the living room. I had a little bit of trouble with these actually, I didn’t know until I got them developed, you’ll see when you see the photoset, a lot of them the image of me wasn’t exposed enough, it was underexposed, so you can’t really see me and it’s mostly just landscape. I think it’s because I was taking self portraits and I was doing this number where I was back here and reaching to the camera to press the camera to get it to do the self timer and then I would come back, so I think in the moving… it would assume it was taking the picture of me this close and then I would move back and the exposure needed to be different than when I was this close, so yeah so that didn’t work very well. But I still really love the photos that did show up, you’ll see what I mean when you see them. They’re still amazing landscapes so you’ll enjoy them either way hopefully. Then I also have, to make up for some of the only landscape photos, I also have some self portraits that I took in the summer of 2020, some of the very few things that I created in 2020, they’re medium format panoramic pinhole self portraits. The panoramic pinhole camera is one that I made with my dad when I was in college. Actually, if you hold on one second I’m going to get the camera and show you what it looks like because it’s really cool. Okay thank you for your patience.
This is the camera, there’s a pinhole in here, you probably can’t see because it’s really tiny, but that’s essentially the “lens” and this is my shutter, and this is the film advance. It is panoramic because it has the curved film plane, and it takes medium format film. So yeah I think it’s pretty cool. I need to re-glue this thing in here, because last time I shot with it this nut/bolt thing that came out, it’s just glued in there. There’s a photo in one of these self portraits that looks like a double exposure of me against a fence and then the sky and trees. That’s on accident because this fell off the tripod and was exposed to the sky and trees and I was like “fuck it, I’m going to still try to take a picture anyway” and then took a self portrait with that part of the film, so that’s what happened there. Some of these, not all of these, but some of these panoramic pinhole self portraits, I took during a live video chat with a few of you members. We just hung out on video chat while I was taking these photos in the back yard. Sorry I haven’t shown them to you yet, it’s been a while but uhm… here they are. So yeah if you want to know more about this camera I can talk to you more about it. It was pretty fun to make, I don’t know if I’ll ever do it again. You have to open it with a little screwdriver because this is the only way it opens, and also this is how I take the photos. I have this chart, I do a meter reading and find where it matches up. Say if it was f/8 1/60 of a second, then I would go all the way over here… so that means between 6 and 10 seconds I need to have the exposure, beacuse my aperture is tiny as fuck, it’s somewhere between f/150-f/200. So since it was between 6-10 seconds I would probably do an 8 second exposure, so that’s how I did all of those, is with this. And they turned out really well. Also if they were longer exposures, like some of them were probably around the 30 second range, yeah long exposure, you’ll see this because I did it a lot. I would go to one place and then count a third or a half of the time that I was supposed to take, and then move, so that it looked like a double exposure, but it’s really a single exposure, it’s just a long exposure and I moved. Yay photography.
This is a long video already but I want to give you a short recap of what is about to happen. This is the last weekly post like this for the foreseeable future, unless I change my mind. The things that will be happening soon: sometime in March I will be making a mass upload of all of the first look and all of my backlog content, photos and videos, so it’s a fuck ton, I’ll be doing a mass upload sometime in March. I’m also working on overhauling my whole website. I might be starting to do some of that before this comes out, we’ll see. I will be doing at least once a month members-only community gatherings online, virtual hangouts, and right now that’s the plan. I might be changing other things but right now at this point I’ll be doing the members-only events like online hangout topic let’s talk let’s learn let’s do things together. I would really like to experiment with virtual nude gatherings and focus more on creating free resources for people and talking more about queerness and gender and ecosexuality and non monogamy and… what else? I have a whole list, energy healing, movement as medicine, spirituality, plant medicine, all kinds of stuff. So more on that soon. I don’t want to give it all away.
So basically if you’re a member here you’re a sponsor of me creating things that will hopefully help everyone. I don’t want to gatekeep the information that I have that is helpful for a lot of people, whether or not they can afford it, like the queerness and ecosexuality kind of stuff. So yall will be the reason that I’m able to do that if that makes sense. Like, you’re a member to get perks, but also you’re allowing me to create things and share things that help everybody, so that means a lot, a whole lot. So that’s where I’m at right now. I will probably, my guess is I will still make some videos like this because vlogs are fun and I like to let yall know what’s going on so… it just won’t be, I won’t have a set schedule of when I’ll be posting stuff like this. I will probably make a schedule for our monthly video hangouts. Comment below or email me (OR CLICK HERE FOR A QUICK AND EASY SURVEY!) and tell me what days of the week work best for you, what times, I’m assuming nights and weekends, people probably work, let me know… I obviously probably can’t accommodate everyone’s schedule, but I’ll do my best to do the members-only virtual hangouts when the most amount of people are available. So that’s the plan right now, yay.
I can’t believe this is the last week. I love you, thank you for being here, it means so much! You are the reason that I can do any of this in the first place, so I appreciate it greatly. I love you. If you want to know more about my fancy wooden and metal panoramic pinhole camera, let me know, it might be fun to make a youtube video about it or something. Maybe we can do… maybe I can take more self portraits with it and you can be there live with me while I do it, that was pretty fun last time. Let me know if you want to do that again. Okay, I love you, thank you for being here, thank you so much, I’m excited to see where all these changes take all of us. Yeah I’m doing my overhaul of my website, some of it might already be done by the time this comes out. I’m doing some of these videos early so that I can get ahead and make sure I’m not too stressed last minute. I love you, thank you. *blows kiss* Love you! Bye!
All members:
click here to view the 27 image self portrait photoset taken outside of Grand Staircase Escalante during my cross country road trip summer 2019
click here to view the 2.5 minutes of BTS video
Click here for access to my archive of 12,500+ photos & 2,000+ videos
Click here for the passwords, they change the 1st of every month
First Look/All Access members:
click here to view the 38 image self portrait photoset double exposed with images from Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah
click here to view 29.5+ minutes of BTS video
click here to view the 14 image self portrait photoset taken on medium format film with the panoramic pinhole camera that my dad and I built when I was in college