eirasi.is

Self portraits

I think they are called selfies now and shoot by phone. Those self portraits are more often taken with proper SLR camera, tripod and for some of them there is some thought behind them. It was a trend at least here in Iceland in the first years of common digital cameras perhaps around year 2005.

All photos made by me and I am (the only) person on each photo. Usually no assistants in place to help with anything.

Year 2007 I think. The book I am reading through is the Fotolog book. A book with some photos from the web fotolog.net. At that time there was no Instagram I think and Facebook a new thing not well known. Fotolog was somewhat doing the same thing I think as Instagram today.

The painting behind me is from Stórval, Stefán Jónsson frá Möðrudal, the most famous Icelandic naive painter. He mostly painted the mountain Herðubreið.
Shadow on a wall… one of the heat water tanks in Öskjuhlíð Reykjavik, where Perlan is.
This is one of the most popular photos all time I think. I put it in a photo competition at dpchallenge for self portraits and I think it ended in third place.
This one was used in a photo competition where the subject was “Madness” I think. I was not desperate, crazy, mad or anything… just trying to look like that.
This is an old one from year 1995 or so. My shadow on a river while walking over the bridge. Emstruá in the Laugavegur hiking route.
My girlfriend at that time owned this window-glass-frame or what it is called in English. She got the frame from an old abandoned house in the south-east part of Iceland I think. Most likely the frame is somewhere still in her home where she lives in Akureyri now.
The same window-glass-frame used as a props as in the previous photo.
There is a story about this one. I was trying to make a photo for a photo competition where the subject was “Balance”. The idea was to stand in the horizon so it seemed as I was having balance using the umbrella… supposed to be somewhat silhouette like photo. But I had only few days to send it in and the wind was always heavy. On the last day I went out to try to do what I had planned. The camera on tripod and uising self timer for one minute delay or so. I went away from the camera and opened the umbrella but the umbrella didn’t stand the wind and just widened up. I put it together again and walked back to the camera thinking badly about this bad weather we so often have here in Iceland, when the minute had passed and I got this photo.

It is not a bad one and it has been used as a cover of a book someone published somewhere in Europe. I would have get paid for it but became somewhat complicated to get the payment so I never did.