Self portraits

When I was younger, people used to make fun of me a lot. I wasn’t white enough, I wasn’t black enough, my hair was too dark, too long, curly and the list goes on.
Other than owning my own digital camera at a young age, that’s probably another reason why I got into photography. I wanted to show people that even if they didn’t think I was pretty, at least they could see pretty pictures of me.

I got kinda good at it, don’t you think? This particular picture was taken last year in my dorm room. My roomate was gone for the weekend so I used the wall by her bed as a background. I was actually wearing a bikini in the original image but decided I didn’t want people seeing me so under dressed. A few other things where also altered within this image. The wings for example, are not part of my roomate’s wall.

When I was younger, I turned our guest bathroom into my personal photo studio. It had a white wall (the rest of the house was pink) so I could take pictures of myself there without showing the sinks or toilet. And unlike other people, I made sure that none of these ended up in my final image!
But it wasn’t satisfactory to just take random pictures and post them. They needed to be edited first.  I learned to change a lot of things within the images themselves. I could do color selection, change eye and hair color among other things.The funny thing is, I didn’t know how to use photoshop. The truth is – I still don’t!  As a child, I had learned how to edit pictures on a program called “Soap”… and when that program was no longer available to me, I used Paint. But seriously, paint is such a difficult program to use for editing pictures! I tried some online programs but it was supper annoying how they killed the resolution on the pictures. Then I found one that worked. Do you guys remember Picnik.com? OMG how I miss that site!