Taking Pictures With Your Feet
The best self-portraits I did were made with my feet. Literally. This was back in the old days of 35mm film cameras. I have a long air-tube cable release with a bulb at the end. You connect the screw-in thingy on one end to the shutter release and then press the bulb on the other end to take the picture. The connecting tube is long (I think it’s twenty-five feet). See illustration below — with the tube wound up on its storage reel.
The reason this is better than the camera’s self-timer is that you can choose your time rather than sitting, paralyzed as the camera counts down to zero. And you can use your feet (or knee or elbow …) to press on the release bulb. You can — almost — catch yourself unawares thus making unposed self-portraits. Using my hands to press the bulb seems to make me more self-conscious than using my feet.
Here’s what I did: I set up the camera on a tripod in the bathroom, prefocused on where my head would be when sitting on a chair that was in a fixed spot. I had the cable release bulb where my foot would be. Then, every morning for about two weeks, the very first thing when I got up in the morning, before doing anything else, and before my brain was fully awake, I would sit on the chair and step on the release bulb.
I don’t know about you, but I look awesomely stupid when I wake up. The tornado-ed hair, the corpse-like skin color, the dazed eyes… the pictures were fantastic. Which is why I’m not going to show them to you.
I will show you another example of where I used the air-tube cable release — to demonstrate one of its drawbacks. At the time when I was using it, there was no auto-focus (film, black and white … those were the days. NOT.) So if I, or whatever was being photographed wasn’t where it was supposed to be, it was out of focus.
Below you can see what happened when I was photographing a little copperhead on my couch. (I did this to scare all my snake-phobic friends.) In the upper picture, I am tickling the snake to get him to coil up.
In the second picture, you can see that he’s coiled, but the the near part of his body is out of focus because he moved (duh!). The point of the pictures was to show me “on the couch with the snake” thus the need for the cable release. Time-release doesn’t work well at all in this situation; you have to keep getting up and resetting it, and it goes off at the wrong instant.
I haven’t used the air-tube cable release in years. I don’t even know how one would do this with a digital camera since there is no screw-in hole on the shutter release button. Presumably, there is some wireless remote doo-dad that costs a few hundred dollars. Too much to spend on something that I will only use once or twice for fun.
The air-tube was cheap.
-Julie
