How do you take your own photos when you travel alone? How do you end up with this instead
of this? Well, what if I told you that this, this, this, this, and this are all selfies?
These are all photos that I took of myself when I was traveling alone. Today I'm showing
you exactly how I do it from prepping to psyching yourself out, what to bring, and how to shoot
from sunset to the stars and sunrise. Are you ready? Oh, yeah.
For this, you will need a tripod and a camera but you can totally also use a phone. I just
like to stabilize it on a gimbal or a tripod, and your badass self. And that's really it.
I'm also going to be bringing additional lenses and a drone so that I can show you more advanced
techniques, but don't worry because this tutorial is appropriate for everybody.
My first step is to figure out what I'm going to bring. I like to scan Instagram and look
for the tourism board-managed accounts because they usually aggregate the best photos from
everyone on Instagram. This gives me an idea of the color palette because I really like
to match my outfits to whatever the environment looks like. You can see here when I was photographing
Tahoe where I live, it was mostly electric blue and white.
And then when I went to Mendocino, I moved more into a rainbow, sunset vibe. This time,
I'm headed to Black Rock City, which is going to be white and warm hues. I actually designed
my own stuff for this, which is admittedly over the top and I'm going to pair it with
some pinks, whites, and other colors that are really gonna pop in my environment.
The other thing to consider is when you're going to go take these pictures. If it's a
popular attraction, find the off time for it which usually happens to be super early
in the morning right around sunrise. That's okay though because this is when the lighting
is at its best. It's also wonderful the hour before and during sunset and of course overnight.
And we're going to talk about all of those in this video.
But first, let's talk about how to set up your camera. I like to use the intervalometer
function and set it for one or two seconds so that the camera is taking a picture of
me constantly. Then I'll go back and adjust and change things around if need be. You can
also use a timer function although you'll have to run back and forth or you can use
your phone as a remote.
For sony, it's called Image Edge Mobile. For most advanced cameras, you'll have the ability
to turn on the Wi-Fi function and use your phone as a remote so that you can actually
see what you're taking a picture of. Once you get it set up, it's pretty simple.
Next, let's talk about the all-important mental aspect of taking your own photo. I know that
there can be this, like, weird thing where you're vain if you like taking your own photos
if you celebrate how you look. But if you don't think you're beautiful and apparently
you have low self-esteem, I say why not just let the whole experience be a ton of fun where
you do go out there and you are super excited about it?
And you can totally start in places without other people around first to get used to it.
But even if you're surrounded by a whole bunch of people, honestly, nobody really cares,
I think. Everyone's just worried about themselves. And if they honestly do care that you're taking
pictures of yourself, I feel like that's kind of their problem.
The whole point of going out there is having a good time and feeling good about yourself.
But I would just highly recommend you take some time while you're getting ready to tell
yourself, "I am a queen. I am a generally good person and I always do my best. I'm beautiful.
I deserve to go do this, and I don't care if other people think it's weird."
And just remember that to get good at anything, you have to practice. That includes being
in front of the camera, that includes taking your own photos. Like, if you don't think
it's mind-blowing the first time you do it, just keep practicing and keep having fun with
it. There's, like, no competition here. So just keep going at it so that you can learn.
All right. Here we are.
Time to get ready. I'm feeling this one.
I set up my intervalometer, make sure I'm happy with my settings and start taking the pictures.
Then I'll come back, review what I've taken, and make some adjustments.
In this case, it looked way better to raise the tripod higher. It actually slimmed me, and it made the sun cut off my head less.
The best thing you can do is just have fun with this. Tell yourself you're a queen. Tell
yourself that you're sexy and beautiful. And if that feels weird, just tell yourself to
have a good time. Play music if you want to. Whatever it takes to have more fun with it,
it will translate to the camera. If you want some help, I've got a seven-day free pose
challenge that you can sign up for in the show notes below.
Once the sun dipped over to the mountains, I switched to the Southwest and had the sun
rays to the side of me. This gives a different look but one that I love equally as much.
Sometimes to keep things in focus, especially if I'm shooting at 100 millimeters, like in
this example, I'll put a water bottle out there, focus on that, and then go stand exactly
where that water bottle was.
Next, it's time for star shots. This is definitely advanced but I'll just run you through my
settings right now. I feel like it got so cold and it all happened so fast. It's onesie
time. Yay, it's onesie time. So I'm just looking right now at Star Walk 2. This app tells me
exactly where the Milky Way is gonna be. Right about there. Cool.
I kind of thought it was that way. It's usually in the southwestern sky in the summer. I parked
just so that I could, like, lay and watch it on my side. It's gonna be awesome.
In order to get this shot, I set the tripod very close to the ground. I focused as best I could and
then I posed. The settings for this were f4 at 1/5 of a second, and the ISO was pretty
low at 200.
I do this earlier in the evening, and then I set up my tripod to take a time-lapse at
4 a.m. when I knew the Milky Way core would be visible. Where I posed and where I took
the Milky Way core photo were at the exact same position, just one was earlier than the
other. Then I opened them both in Photoshop and I used the selection tool to select the
foreground of the first photo.
You can have it automatically select and it usually does a pretty good job. But in this
case, I needed to select the foreground as well. Then it's as easy as dragging it over
to the star shot that I've chosen. From there, I just delete the excess parts that look a
little bit weird.
Then I export it into Lightroom and clean it up a little bit. I put a filter on that's
going to make it all match, just something that I created myself previously. And after
it's cropped and I like it the way it looks, I export it, and then I've got my final image.
In order to take the actual star shot, I recommend using a lens that can go down to an f1.4.
If that's not available to you, an f4 is still great. Go as wide as you can.
This was shot at 18 millimeters at 15 seconds and an ISO of 3,000 and an f1.4. If my camera
only went down to an f4, I would do an f4 at 30 seconds with an ISO of 6,400. You must
have a tripod for this in order to not have blur. Okay, I didn't sleep a lot because I
was taking star photos. And now I'm trying so hard to do the sunrise, but it's very,
very cold, but I'm awake anyway. So I'm just kind of waiting in here until it's, like,
getting up then I'll go.
That looks pretty cool.
I'm so glad I came. The sunrise was insane.
I loved it. I will never use baby wipes on my face again. It was beautiful even though
it was, like, really windy last night. It was the complete silence that really got me
and got my mind going. So my sleep wasn't amazing but my sunrise was. Windy out there.
I'm gonna try to sleep though.