Everybody seems to be taking selfies, now a days, don’t they? Nothing to it, really, you just take as much of your clothes off as you dare, stand in front of the bathroom mirror, grab your iPhone, take the shot, txt it to your bff, who instagrams it. It goes viral, you get kicked out of jr. high, but it doesn’t matter bc you’re already famous.
But how about if you’re not a teen girl with a cute little, um, figure? Or you’re not Ellen Degeneres or the President? Your idea of a selfie is just whippin’ out your iPhone, holding it at arms length, and voila.
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. PLEASE.
Now our man in Sag Harbor, a self described Senior Teenager, has come to the rescue! And not one minute too soon. Goes down like this.
Jonathan Morse has been doing a series of slightly over the top portraits of high mileage artists and writers, (who are rather thick on the ground, in and about Sag Harbor), and all of a sudden, he wants to get in on the fun. But he knew from bitter experience that just grabbing his Six Plus and popping the flash in his face was not going to produce a very pretty picture. Not very pretty at all. (See above). And trying to take a studio portrait with a camera’s self timer, is a oft trod path to desperate disappointment.
So... letting necessity once again give motherhood to invention, he creates the “Studio Selfie”. Works like this. First you set up your Sony full frame mirrorless camera, (our man favors the A7r ), the way you normally do, on your studio stand, connected wirelessly to your strobes. Then you download the Sony app, playfully named “Play Memories”, on to your iPhone.
First the ugly part. You have to figure out how to drill deeply down into the menus to pair the camera and iPhone. Our man wouldn’t dream of opening the Sony instruction manual for this sort of thing, preferring instead to turn to The Unofficial and Quintessential Guide to the Sony a7 and A7r by Matsumoto and Roullard. You purists out there will select .jpg and raw.
Then the beauty part: your iPhone has not only become the shutter release of your camera, but it becomes the biggest damn viewfinder you have ever seen, and it’s right in the palm of your hand. How great is that? You take your position in front of the camera, pose and compose whilst looking at your celly, then lower the phone and take the picture. After a couple of tries, you should be looking at something like this,
George Mittendorf, sculptor
or this,
Frank Gioeli, Multimedia artist.
The best part, you can truthfully confide to one and all, “ Oh, I just took that with my cell”.
Sweet.
