Resourcefulness: Or, How to Do A Solo Photo Shoot

If you haven’t checked out my Palm Beach Athletic Wear review or entered the giveaway for a $50 giftcard…you should go do it now.

I mentioned the other day that I ended up doing a photo shoot of myself with just my iPhone, a tripod, and a camera timer app… so I thought I’d fill you in on how I did it, and what gear I used.

A while ago, I bought this Joby iPhone tripod, and I’ve only used it a tiny bit for Face Time (hands free Face Time—can’t beat it!) and for a vlog about home workout equipment, my yoga warm-up video, and a Ugi and Sandbag workout video. Being that I just moved to Santa Monica and don’t know a lot of people I feel comfortable enough with to ask for photog help on the beach at 7am, I thought I’d use the Joby for my review pictures.

Here’s the Joby:

This guy can hold your phone in either a portrait or landscape position—you clip the case onto your iPhone, and then slide the tripod onto the frame. The great thing is that the legs of Joby can be moved to all different positions, so it doesn’t need to be on an even or flat surface. Also, you could hang it upside down (your iPhone reorients itself automatically) by wrapping the legs around a railing or something else.

What I did was go down to the beach by a lifeguard stand and do a combo of pics on the lifeguard stand and next to it. The phone/camera position was either in the sand, on the surface of the lifeguard stand, or wrapped around the railing. I’ll admit, I need some practice with this–the angles of many of my pics are awful, and I didn’t do a great job of making sure I was actually fully in the pictures (as evidenced by ones I posted yesterday).

I used a camera timer app, and set the countdown, period (time between shots), and # of shots at 10 sec, 2 sec, and 5 sec.

Here’s what I found—using these multi shot settings caused the resolution to go way down. So if you want better resolution (you can tell which ones I used this combination of times for because the pics are small and fuzzy), you should increase the time between shots or just take single shots with the timer instead of multiples. I had no idea this would happen when I did my photo shoot. In the future, I’ll do it differently!

It was only after I was done that I noticed the lifeguard stands said, “Keep Off.” Oops.

Here are a few of my outtakes from that photo shoot… there are tons of them because it was bright outside and I couldn’t see the screen on the phone to know when it was about to take pics. It did beep and give warnings, but somehow I still didn’t manage to coordinate and be ready!

So there you have it.

I’ll probably use this method again. It was a little annoying, but it worked, and it feeds my personality trait of not wanting to ask anyone for help. I got enough “good” pics to put in the review…and the crappy ones, well, I’ll delete them!

News/Notes: It’s Wednesday. I’m doing so well at tackling my To Do Lists this week…but I’m still feeling a little bit in limbo. I have a plan though! I’m waiting to hear from my new apartment manager regarding square footage and hallway logistics to decide if I’ll just move all of my furniture here. It may be too big for the space, but if I can get it into the building, it seems like a better idea to just move it here (besides, I love it). It’s only $200 more to move everything across the country compared to moving just stuff and no furniture.

My aunt and uncle are driving up from San Diego today, and we’re going out to lunch. I’m so lucky they are close by–aside from the obvious reasons regarding having a support system, they also are going to loan me some stuff to use during the span of time (Oct 6-Nov) when I’m in my apartment and all my stuff is still in NY. It’ll be kind of like camping, but I think it will be great. So, if you’re planning to visit and don’t want to sleep on the floor…wait till November 🙂