At Comic con everyone and their mother is trying to get you to take an ad or a free post card to sell their brand. On the whole I’m fairly good about waving them off but one of the booths had a card that caught my eye (shown above: @prideclothing). I looked at it and thought, “I think I can do that”.

Well it became painfully obvious that I would not be able to reproduce her half snarking/half mean mugging face. But while I had the camera set up, I thought, why not give other faces a shot? I’ve never done something like this before but I cannot deny it, it’s really fun! Usually I’m one who enjoys staying behind the camera, it was slightly disorienting but really fun to be in front of it.

I tried running through the gauntlet of emotions that I knew/learned about while doing Masterlife. Unfortunately most of my emotions are characterized about feeling “positive” or “negative”, or in dire cases, feeling “really positive” and “really negative”. We even joked that if we were to quantify it we’d feel +1 or -1 about something. “Emotionally ignorant” is a fairly apt description of me.

So I explored my emotional spectrum…and it was limited. After about 2 or 3 I ended up just making faces and reactions. Do reactions = emotions? Is surprised an emotion? Is exhilaration?

What’s an easy way to define emotions? Is it something you feel or something you are? If I said, “I am happy” vs. “I feel happy”. Do both describe emotions or is one a state and not an emotion?

As you can tell, I still got quite a lot to learn in the emotional department. In any case, this was really fun session of self portraits. I might even try working on some fresh faces and capture another batch another day. If you’re interested in doing something like this, let me know! You never know what could happen!