How To Take The Ultimate Selfie

Time magazine just named Makati City, Philippines as The Selfie Capital of the world. And as a proud Filipino I have done my shares of selfie in the interweb.

There are tons of selfies in the internet taken using a smartphone, but those do not compare to the greate selfies I have seen was on Flickr, where people take the time to light or setup their shots and use “real cameras” to take their selfies, just to name one that I always follow is Dustin Diaz’s flickr.

There are a lot of ways to do a selfie using your dslr, so to each his own, this is a quick tutorial on how I do my selfies. [editor note: Laya’s Selphies are some of the best I’ve ever seen so you may wanna hit the jump see what he has to offer]1. To start off you need to use a tripod. (or lay your camera down somewhere stable)

2. I think the hardest part in doing selfies is the focusing, because you are doing this alone (which I normally do), I place a lightstand which is my easy to manage, always available stand-in. I place the light stand where I will be standing and adjust the height of the lightstand as tall as my eyes. I prefocus on the silver part of the lightstand and switch my camera to manual focus. so It does not re-focus. Mark the floor or use an already existing mark to know where the light stand is even after you move it away.

3. If you have a wireless trigger, you just move to where the lightstand (stand-in) was, then move it somewhere or fold it so it won’t be seen in the camera then click the trigger.

4. If you don’t have a trigger, set your camera to timer mode (15-20sec), and do the same technique. Another option is to use the built in intervalometer (Nikon) or Magic Lanteren Intervalometer (Canon)

5. After that, it’s just a matter of adjusting your light.

Some Examples of selfies:

Sample 1 – For the love of hotpockets

Sample 2 – Reading on top of our roof

Sample 3 -Huwaatt??!

Sample 4 – HighSpeed Selfie

Sample 5 – Masked

I hope we are not going to regret this, but… Please share your selphies in the comments below 🙂