For work, I recently looked up information on psychological disorders or pathologies caused by digital media and technologies and I came across something interesting: selfitis, or the obsessive need to take and post selfies. According to researchers, selfitis – the term first appeared in 2014 – is a mental disorder. When wandering the streets with my camera, I like taking pictures of people with their smartphones (see one of my earlier blog posts), because attention is then completely caught up by the tiny screen and the photographer is not given any interest. Walking by touristic sites also provides opportunities to see people taking selfies.

Personally, I limit selfies to very rare occasions and mostly to moments with my 2-year old daughter. However, when seeing the profile pictures of photographers online, many are extremely creative and artistic. And some of them experiment with shadows. In my case, my shadows sometimes introduce themselves when shooting from the hip and with the low-standing sun in the back. My profile picture here for the website is one of those examples.

Selfie | 2017

The reason why I write this post today is that it happened again and this time the shadow adds something spooky to the whole composition.

Leggy shadows | 2018

Selfies can be an explicit artistic and very creative mean for photographers. At the same time, they can be completely unwanted and you discover something interesting in editing and post-production.

To end this weeks post on a more personal note, I would like to share one other “selfie” which, this time, was planned and wanted. In summer 2017, my daughter started walking and as a proud dad, I took many, many pictures of this huge achievement of my baby girl. The picture below is one those in which I wanted to document that I was actually documenting every step…