Capturing your own fitness and lifestyle photos at home - my adventure with self portraits

It's safe to say I miss client shoots a lot! So much so that I decided to take up Rankin's self-portrait challenge - a self portrait per day for a week. Firstly, I think like many photographers I'm not that keen on being in front of the camera and secondly, it felt like a week of photos in isolation would need quite a bit of creativity to make it interesting. In the end I decided I'd just try to capture things we do daily at the moment and see how it goes. I mean hey, if it didn't work I never had to post any of them. But it also got me thinking that everyone who had a shoot booked in could probably use the tips and tricks I learned from this experiment.

Lighting

As the weather has been absolutely lovely it's the perfect time to try out these lovely warm golden hour images. The best time for this is in the evenings, the two hours leading up to sunset. In theory the light is great just after sunrise as well, but I'm really not a morning person, so that wasn't really an option.

You could also experiment with shadows for interesting effects. In the image on the left I used a badminton racket to create the criss cross shadow you see in the image, but obviously that's not the only option.

Alternatively, using shadows against a window for backlit images like below for more abstract images, could also make for an interesting image.

Backdrop

If you want to go for a minimalistic image, make sure you find a non busy backdrop that goes with the image colour wise. As when taking photos at home this isn't always an option, so if you do need to tune out a busy background, blurring out the background and focusing on the main thing in the image can be an alternative option. This can be achieved with low aperture lenses of 1.4 or newer iPhones (although personally I'm not a big fan of the latter as it looks quite artificial).

Props

Ever wondered what to do with your hands in the image or how to pose? Well, props are a great idea to help out with that! For fitness it could be weights, yoga mats etc or if you're just going for a portrait could be anything from pets (my cat finds herself forced into many of my shoots!) to a book or your flatmate chatting to you in the background to capture more natural images. Anything that puts you at ease in your images is a great idea really!

Equipment

I mean I'm all for a good balancing act, but if you don't have a flatmate, a tripod is such a lifesaver. Additionally, for an ease of the process, a camera or a phone with auto focus is a massive help as well. And if you want to push it even further you could use a trigger to be completely in charge of when the photo is taken.

Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to know? Otherwise, happy experimenting! In the end it's all trial and error...