Selfie...

                                  "Selfie"

I wanted to look into the idea of a selfie, as this is a modern and more easily recognisable form of a self portrait. I thought about the platforms we use to take selfies, using a front facing phone camera is preferable to this since 2003 when mobile phone companies brought out this revolutionary way of taking a picture of yourself. Since then, we have had many different ways to alter our faces such as PhotoBooth which appeared on most Apple products which distorted the face. After looking into Nick Knight's Dolls series I like the idea of distorting the face.  I find it hard to look at myself in pictures and find it more comfortable as it is a sort of "mask" to hide behind. Thinking about distortion as a theme for my self-portrait, I thought about the most current and popular ways to distort a "selfie" and found that Snapchat was the best and most effective way to distort a face. I looked through the different "filters" which alter the face and the most visually disturbing has to be the "face swap" filter which allows you to use an image of another face and it maps it to yours in live time. From playing around with this, I have thought about using projection to create a similar effect. I would like to experiment with projecting an image of my face onto my face and see what kind of effect this has.

Contact sheet for experiment 

I don't think that this idea has been successful as the images didn't turn out how I expected they would have. Visually, it was difficult to line up the image with my face and when I managed it, the image didn't have much distortion. I tried photoshopping multiple images of my face onto one image and then projected that, however this also didn't really have the desired effect and just made my face look like I had a smirk. Visually the colour isn't right either as the projection makes my face appear more pink in tone as the projected images colour has faded through the process of projecting it.