new selfie + my love of multiples

Hey! A new photo! My most recent self-portrait was inspired by none other than the awful heat wave that seems to be permeating all parts of San Diego, and man, was I a sweaty mess while shooting this. You can read more about it on my flickr page (and see it a little bigger too, if you care about that kinda thing).

I think a natural part of practicing photography is that eventually you start seeing themes in your own work, and I think it's official: I love multiples. When I see multiples of something in an image, it just makes my brain and eyeballs feel good. No wonder I've done more than a few.

Lemons! Lots and lots of lemons. As with most of my 'multiples' images, this was a composite of about seven images. I only had one bowl full of lemons, so I shot the same bowl several times in various places, while also moving the lemons around within the bowl itself. Then I put them all together in Photoshop.

Here I am as a crazy tea lady with her ginormous cups of tea. I think I was drinking Earl Grey that day. For this one, I had two actual cups of tea that I kept moving around as I shot. And this was a bit trickier to composite due to all the crazy shadows. I'll admit, some of my editing was sloppy in this one.

For this one I folded a bunch of paper planes, strung them up by attaching them to an overhead lamp, and then swung them around multiple times while I shot. Now that I'm looking at this again, I'm really not liking the wrinkly bed sheet I hung in the background, but hey, I did this one like two years ago.

If you're a photographer, do you find recurring themes in your work? I'd love to hear! In the meantime, I plan to chug water all day and exert as little energy as possible :)