The art of self photography

I’ve long since been an exponent of self photography - way before the selfie era care around, and mostly out of necessity. Here’s an extract from a feature I wrote on the art a while back. This cut peers into the trials and tribulations of self photography in the film era, which was a tense time.

All of my early self-photography was done on these EOS film cameras, and mostly by using the built in 10-second self-timer. This was often a tricky, and expensive game; I could be on the road for weeks, even months without actually seeing what I was capturing in those little green canisters, which was always a little stressful. Thankfully, through a great deal of trial and error I figured out what did and didn’t work, although I could not imagine stepping back to film.

There were a few remote gadgets available back then – mostly Pocket Wizards; but they were way to bulky and complicated for my liking, and would often ruin a good shot by photo bombing. I did, at times, use the tiny Canon remotes, although the slightest wind or bad vibe and it didn’t work. 

Pinning those 10-seconds down was always a lot of work, and could take 5, even 10 blind frames to nail. I had to be on the bike in a good clean, appropriate action pose, not simply rolling along or grinning for the camera. On average I would need to pull 5 pages worth of good images out for a feature, around 5 rolls on a good day.