The intent for the photo was to document a culinary creation, but when I inspected the image, there it was: A cameo appearance. It was unintentional, so this was not an attempt to emulate Alfred Hitchcock. He made an art of doing a cameo appearance in his movies.
Well, let’s look at the photo.
There, very obvious once you look at it, is “my self-portrait”, in classic photographer pose – look at the spoon. I’ll show it flipped so you don’t have to turn your monitor on its head.
Normally I try to make sure that I show just the subject, no more, no less, but when it comes to reflective surfaces it is easy to catch yourself in your photos.
Particularly prone to inadvertent self-portraiture are domed or concave shiny surfaces like the spoon here.
Cars are just chuck full of such mirrors, especially in and around the lights. Here are three examples. The first one, on the left, is rather obvious. The other two are more subtle.
Other “cameo traps” are the glass surfaces of buildings. So many of today’s architecture is full of angles and curved glass. Take pictures in a town area and your chanced of self-portraiture are pretty good. You may get unexpected photos of your companions along with yourself.
Windows of all types can provide the opportunity for self-aggrandizement. That includes the zoo, the aquarium and other places that put a window between you and your subject. Now go look through your own collection!
.:.
© 2012 Ludwig Keck
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ReplyDeleteBeatrice wrote: Ludwig, I've had some problems with reflections also when photographing items to sell on eBay. Particularly irksome are anything with glass, such glass framed artwork.
ReplyDeleteA typo crept into her text which lead me to the discovery that I cannot edit comments. Not here at Blogger, anyway. (So I deleted the original comment.)
I will set up my "reflection tamer" an describe my technique in a future post.