The 4th Finale

I can hardly believe that I've been doing a self-portrait a day for 4 whole years! I feel like though this year has been kinda lacking in artistic quality, it's been one of the craziest and best years of the whole project! =D Got all moved in with my fiance, planned a wedding, got married, had an amazing honeymoon, came home to a new job, and now we're preparing for the next step in our newlywed life of owning our own home! So I really wanted to end the year on a high and very memorable note, and I just couldn't figure out a fun new twist on my end-of-the-year shot. So I figured this year I should do something to really commemorate the awesome things that have happened in the past 365 days! (366 since leap day fell into that group of days) And what's more memorable from the year I got married than my fabulous wedding dress!

Since I do everything myself (the muscle man did help out a little bit haha!), one of my favorite things to do is show how much work is really involved in creating these shots. I have to get the photos printed, sort them into roughly chronological order (this year the printer actually had them in order, that saved me probably an hour haha!). Then it's back home to get the area ready, this year that meant clearing out the living room and vacuuming the floor, no backdrop to lay out like in previous years, but I had to make sure the floor was spotless, especially since I was going to put my wedding dress down on it haha! Next I have to determine where the camera is going to be, and where the boundaries of the frame are so I know where to put the photos.  Then it takes quite a while to lay out all the photos, then rearrange them to make everything look appropriate and no 'bald' spots... Finally I lit the shot, which is very hard because the photos I print are only available in glossy finish (I'm cheap, so I'm not going to pay double just to get a matte finish and a normal print size haha... these are all 3.5"x5" prints =P)  Overall I think it was about 2 hours from setup to shoot...

And then of course, there's always more than one shot that would look awesome, so I edited several others! The only downside to this setup is there's only one appropriate camera angle, so all the shots wind up looking quite similar...

As always, there's a couple more over at deviantArt. And yes, I'll be doing the self-portrait thing again for a 5th year, I think I'm going to start a weekly blog of 'outtakes' or alternate shots, but we'll see how that goes! =)