Lessons in Selfies

If you have a portable cell phone in your hand (as it seems nearly everyone does!) you may already have taken plenty of "selfies." In case you haven't heard, these are photos you can take of yourself with your phone. Sometimes people lift up a phone and take a photo of a group of people around about them- selves.

You may recall that though I have such a 'phone' I use it in a very limited way. I tell friends that I keep mine in my purse so that if I have car trouble somewhere, I can call the CAA to come rescue me. (That's the Canadian Automobile Association).

Actually, more often now, when I want to login to a business site, they insist on sending me a code to my phone's messenger program and then I must quickly enter that 6/7 digit code into the authenticator before it expires. (A username and password is no longer good enough).

Well, I've used a cheap $20 used digital camera for about 10 years now, and when it balked I had one given to me by friends, (which doesn't connect to my desktop so I can transfer photos). I bought a new one on Amazon, which also has problems now... so I've had to resort to using my cell phone as a camera.

It has been obvious for some time that I need a new busines card and the photo of myself on my sites is also getting quite dated. So, I've been promising myself, that I must take selfies until I get one good enough to use on my business card.

On the Sunday evening, a week before Easter, I took a bunch of photos, but none looked right to me. The glare of the overhead lights made shadows on my face. I tried a number of poses in various rooms, and finally decided that I needed to wait for a sunny day.

About midnight this last Sunday night I remembered this plan. I didn't feel quite sleepy enough yet, so I decided to try my selfies again. Which I did for about half an hour, but the harsh lights from above put shadows or wrinkles on my face. I didn't like either of them there.

So yesterday morning I dressed in my Sunday blouse and jacket again, and went from window to window to use the indirect sunlight, and took dozens of selfies. When it was nearly noon and the phone showed that I had 85 photos, I decided it was time to stop and work at transferring them to my desktop.

That was tricky too, as I need to do it on Tom's old Windows computer first, then move them to a USB stick, and then, move them from the stick to my regular-use Linux desktop.

Next, I moved all the bad ones into a discard folder, and all the 'maybes' into another folder. That greatly reduced the ones to crop, and edit a bit -lighter or darker... etc.

The rest of the day was busy with my normal agenda, and I doubt I'll have time to finish with them today, but hopefully a day this week will have a free time slot to come up with one I am willing to use long-term.

On second thought, maybe I should take another batch without my neck brace on. That seemed to make me look like I have a square jaw. . . Hey, am I the only one who fussses so much over an effort to get a satisfactory selfie to put up in public.

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