No doubt lots of people would enjoy a selfie challenge. I am not one of those people! Maybe it’s something to do with being 50+, or maybe it’s that I don’t think they’re flattering, but I don’t think I’ve ever posted a self-portrait photograph taken with a phone camera held in my hand. And the only selfie stick I’ve ever used is a tripod for my regular camera, which I trigger with a self-timer or an app on my phone!

But I’ve got a 4+ year streak going, and have never missed a month of the photo blogging challenge, so I was determined to be creative enough to be able to post again this month. Here’s my five:

1. Beakerhead Hip Image Selfie Collage

Long-time readers will probably remember that I’ve been a member of the Beakerhead volunteer photo crew for several years running. This year, one of my assignments was the weekday Four-to-Six event, which is basically like a street market for STEAM enthusiasts, featuring a few dozen science, technology, engineering, art and/or mathematics interactive exhibits and booths. It was unseasonably cold my assigned afternoon, so I managed to take a turn in the Hip Image mobile photo booth, all decked out in accessories recommended by the proprietors. This is a photo of the almost-instant print I brought home:

2. Lace Your Face

Another of my Beakerhead assignments was to spend the better part of two days at the University of Calgary for their science-art exhibition and their impressive program of (graduate) student STEAM projects. One of the most intriguing projects I saw was a new kind of security system under development by a group of masters level students.  They’re using infrared scanning to identify individuals based on their bones. The current accuracy rate is about 93%, so they’ve got a ways to go, but I’m not sure I like thinking about the possibilities of being scanned/tracked wherever I go based on my bones!

The project with the longest line up was called Lace Your Face. It’s basically a knitted selfie, created using a small photo booth camera, connected to a laptop which runs a program against the image taken by the camera to create knitting instructions for a 1980s-era Brother knitting machine, which you then sit in front of to knit your face in 104 rows! I was impressed that the program properly identified the silver streaks along my part line. Now I need to figure out how to finish the edges, block this into a rectangular shape and make something that incorporates this as part of the design.

3. Pretend Selfie

This one is from my everyday carry Olympus camera, mounted on a tripod. I’m looking at my phone because I’m fiddling with the controls in the Olympus app, which I can use to adjust ISO, shutter speed, aperture, white balance and focal point. I can also download photos from the SD card in my camera to my phone or tablet for some quick editing to push to social media, when time is of the essence. There was no time pressure that particular afternoon – just a bit of pressure to adequately preserve the beautiful fall colours and sunshine in South Glenmore Park (Calgary, AB)!

4. Couples Selfie

There’s probably a specific word for the couples selfie (leave a comment if you know what it is or have a suggested one word term for couples selfie – maybe celfie?). Regardless, I don’t know what it is. The point is, sometimes it’s better to include both halves of a couple in the selfie, which, IMHO, is much easier to do if your selfie stick is your tripod (carefully dug into the snow a little ways along the ridge) and you can trigger the shutter on your camera with your phone. This one is from September 23, after a couple of early season snowfalls in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.

And here’s a bonus image, taken a week later, in another part of the Canadian Rockies. What looks like snow in this one is actually bits of glacier:

5. Look Where I Am Selfie

Another kind of selfie that I regularly see posted on social media is what I call the “look where I am” selfie, often to showcase an especially exotic vacation or that you’re somewhere especially cool or interesting. It should be no surprise to regular readers that my “look where I am” selfie shows me out and about, enjoying nature! BTW, you can’t see my phone in my hand because I figured out how to set a six second delay from when I trigger the shutter with my phone, which is just enough time to set my phone on the ground and say “cheeseburger”!

And that’s it! Now that I’ve kind of got the hang of using the whole camera-on-a-tripod-with-smartphone-app-trigger thing, it’s time to move on to next month’s theme. But first, hop on over to PJ’s post to see what other participants came up with for this month’s selfie challenge.

Thanks, PJ, for keeping this challenge going. The one-month time frame makes it a low stress “photo assignment” that motivates me to keep honing my photography skills. New participants are welcome any time, so please join us! The next theme will be posted at a ‘lil Hoohaa on October 1st, so come back then and check it out!