Looking at those youtube videos of people taking pictures of themselves every day for years, I find i want to do it too.... but HOW?

January 27, 2009 12:04 PM

Looking at those youtube videos of people taking pictures of themselves every day for years, I find i want to do it too.... but HOW?

So after looking at all these videos of people taking pictures of themselves everyday for years, such as here i am interested in doing the same thing so i have something to look at years from now. The only problem i have now is how to go about actually doing this. We have a canon dslr, which is really good but then i run into the problem of taking a picture of myself everyday in the same pose ideally so the background isnt moving around. I also have a 1.3MP webcam built into my laptop, and i run ubuntu so I was wondering if maybe getting a script to take a picture of myself everyday would work too (i wouldnt know how to write this). What are your ideas? Thanks!

posted by Javed_Ahamed to grab bag (12 comments total)

For starters, I'd imagine you'd have to make marks as to where to stand and where your head would go.... probably in front of a mirror would be a good place so that you can position yourself correctly.
posted by alpha_betty at 12:15 PM on January 27

The Daily Mugshot is one place that can automate it for you if you have a webcam...
posted by verb at 12:19 PM on January 27 [1 favorite]

For the record, I find these things the most annoying navel gazing thing ever. It's always hipster dudes. If it were, like, hairy dude in the wilderness every day for eight years, with food on his beard, or even, kind of cute girl, that'd be awesome. Frowning dude...kinda makes me sad.

Ok I apologize for that.

I don't think these people are worrying about the background particularly. They are probably just going against a white wall or something in their house. You can see the edges of the picture on the video you posted, so they are not even worrying about the framing. I'm not sure how, but they are overlaying images over each other and aligning them, probably on the eyes and nose. Probably you could do that in FCP or something like that? Maybe even IMOVIE.

Nice thing though, you take the pictures for eight years and worry about what video program will do that in eight years. You'll probably be able to just put your flash drive in your brain and make the video that way.

Seriously though i think if you just take a jpeg each day and have a system to keep them organized by date, putting them in a video file is not going to be a problem.
posted by sully75 at 12:22 PM on January 27 [1 favorite]

There was an AskMe thread about this exact question that seemed to give pretty detailed advice. I feel like it was during the first half of 2008, more or less. Maybe someone can find it.
posted by Jaltcoh at 12:25 PM on January 27

Instead of worrying about the background staying the same, you could take a picture with a different background each time. Use a yardstick to get the distance right and either have someone take the picture or use a tripod and a timer.
posted by stavrogin at 12:33 PM on January 27

I think that the main issue is having the camera the same distance from your face. that way your FACE is the same size in all the pictures, which will make lining them up a whole lot easier. I think most people are shooting these pictures by holding the camera an arms length away from them, simple and easy.
posted by sully75 at 12:39 PM on January 27

This question has some details of how to do time-lapse photography in general, although it's more focused on buildings than people.
posted by pmann at 1:42 PM on January 27

Instead of worrying about the background staying the same, you could take a picture with a different background each time. Use a yardstick to get the distance right and either have someone take the picture or use a tripod and a timer.

I think it would be cool to have some sort of an animated image going on, like a sun that rises and falls or something.
posted by SpacemanStix at 2:33 PM on January 27 [1 favorite]

One of these videos I've seen was done over several years, and I thought it was really interesting to see the backgrounds change, and ponder the changes that must have taken place in his life as well. "Oh he must have gotten a new apartment" "Ooh, is that a new girlfriend?" "A hotel, must be on vacation. I wonder where?" etc. I didn't really care about the guy so much as I did learning about his life, or at least the periphery of his life that could be gleamed from a 1 second glimpse at a frame. That was what kept me watching, and interested as a visual artist. Otherwise you get "the thousand faces of emoboy". (Related YTMND wiki)

On the other end of things, I'm gonna put a plug in for my friend Charles Wood. He was invited to Siggraph 2008 for his project Bodylapse. He took a very technical approach to capturing the changes his body underwent as he lost weight, grew his hair, etc. He ended up making a camera track, a computer controlled tilt/pan servo, and a dedicated studio space with green screen, light set up, calibration marks, and so on.

Though it would probably be a lot easier, I'd forget the laptop camera. Your laptop isn't going to last forever, and 1.3mp is tiny by today's standards, forget about 8 years in the future. Assuming someone might not be there to help you take the photo every time, I'd say get a tall tripod, and a yard stick. A remote release would probably help too. Pick a spot to look at on the camera, put your heels against an evenly lit wall. (or contrastingly lit could be interesting) Put the camera a yard away, set the height, and mark it on your tripod with a sharpie.

I'd say you're best off shooting in jpg. It's probably going to be more archival than RAW or TIFF, and the compression will probably be to your advantage as you collect tons of data. Buy a backup drive. Make sure your camera's clock is always correct.
posted by fontophilic at 2:33 PM on January 27

I did this throughout my wife's pregnancy. Here are the mistakes I made, so you don't make the same ones:

* Get a dedicated camera that you won't be using for anything else, put it on a tripod, tape it to the ground so it doesn't get kicked or moved accidentally. If you try just standing in roughly the same spot every time and do it handheld, you'll have a very difficult time matching the shots. If you use the camera for other things in the meantime, you won't remember what settings / zoom level you used before, and the differences will be very noticeable.

* Put a mark on the floor where you or the model will stand. Guesstimating will not work. If you're doing anything other than a closeup of the face, you'll have to be very careful to get the position the same every time (we tried a full-body 3/4 view, but I wasn't paying attention to where her hands were each time, and she was always turned at a slightly different angle.) If I were going to do this again, I would use a digital camera with a large-ish viewfinder screen, and sketch out the position directly on the screen with a grease pencil so that changes would be easier to see from day to day.

* The "use a yardstick" method is a lot harder than it sounds. We weren't always at home during the whole nine months, so I did some shots in hotel rooms etc by measuring the distance and angles we were using at home and trying to get them the same elsewhere. Not even close. I ended up just tossing those shots out and skipping those days.

* Changes in lighting will be very noticeable. If you're using daylight from a window, you'll have to take the shot at the same time every day (and cloudy days will still cause it to flicker a lot.) Ideally you'd have a dedicated lighting setup rather than depending on daylight. (Ours were taken at all times of day and night, whenever was convenient, so the lighting is particularly uneven.)
posted by ook at 3:12 PM on January 27 [2 favorites]

Previously.
posted by Jaltcoh at 3:55 PM on January 27

I doing this right now for my wife's pregnancy as well and I can second everything stated by ook. We're taking the shots in the future nursery, so that the fetal development will be somewhat correlated with the redevelopment of the room.

The yardstick method has worked somewhat well for us when traveling-it depends on the angles and what not. Ours in profile and pretty easy to replicate.
posted by buttercup at 3:58 PM on January 27