One month ago a very good friend ( let’s call him Seth) called me up in the evening and sensing the weird place I was in suggested that I do a self-portrait as a way of  shifting my energy, a bit of art therapy.   Being that I don’t shoot people too often the idea of the self-portrait is even farther outside the peramiters that I usually shoot in.  But upon getting off the phone I thought, why not, and shot and e-mailed him the photo, to which he replied with the challenge that I do one a day for a month.  So I posted that first one as, portrait of the artist as a perplexed being of light – day one and continued for the next 29 days doing and posting one self-portrait each day.

The only rule I made for myself was that each daily photo had to be shot and posted on that day.

What an incredibly creative month.

Not only did I have to do something that was outside of my usual framework but I had to do it a way that I would be happy with and it had to be sufficiently different each day that it wasn’t just a slight change one day after another becoming boring real quickly.

On most days I would come up with the basic concept then have to figure out how to do it.   Aside from pushing some dormant photography skills, a lot of the photos required quite a bit of post-production using various software, mostly Photoshop.  With both photography and software, I am pretty much self-taught and 30 days ago I was seriously lacking in any real Photoshop skills.  Some of the pieces really forced me to figure out how to use Photoshop and get the results that I wanted and for the most part I was quite excited and happy with the results.  I cannot express how fun it was to post a daily shot then look at it on my site and laugh hysterically at the result.

Thanks to Seth for the concept, to everyone else who commented and encouraged me this past month and a special thanks to a sixteen year-old who I believe has been inspired by my work.

The full set is viewable here:

here are some outtakes

peace and love to all

bryant