Tips for Making Your Selfies More Interesting

Photography Tips

Let’s face it, selfies are one photography trend that probably isn’t going away anytime soon; the least we can do as photographers is try to make them less narcissistic and more compelling to an audience. In the video below, Bryan Peterson suggests a different approach for you to take a self portrait that helps to inject a little humor into it, as well as improve your composition:

What Peterson aims to achieve is to make photographers, regardless of their skill level, more aware of the way they are taking a self portrait and encourage them to get a little more creative than just holding their cameras out at arm’s length and snapping a selfie. His advice?

• Start with a compelling background. For this photo, Peterson goes to the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas.

Turn on the self timer or grab your wireless remote and start creating selfies that are not just about you.

• Create an interesting photo before you put yourself into it. Peterson experiments with shutter speed until he gets a nice looking test shot with eye catching lighting.
• Make yourself less pronounced in the photo. In this case, Peterson got into the lower righthand part of the frame and pretended to climb the building during a 4 second exposure. Think of fun ways to be in the picture without your face taking up most of the image. Try blurring yourself by jumping, running, or twirling. Or get into a part of the photo where viewers won’t expect you to be.

“I don’t need to remind you that the big thing to do today is to take a selfie. What I would like to remind you of is to perhaps put a little bit of time and thought into what kind of selfie you are about to shoot.”