Let's learn how to take fursuit selfies!
Are you stuck at home right now?
Can't have tangible human contact? Bored out of your mind? Living under the fear of a horrible pandemic? Our guess is yes! So why not pass the time taking some selfies to share online with friends. It's a great way to still stay social while practicing social distancing.
Our good friend and mascot Lemont the Lemon Fox is here to provide you with some useful tips and tricks for how to take fursuit selfies. This article will focus on how to take good fursuit photos, with what you’ve got around the house (cause times are tough!). These tips are applicable for selfies of the human you as well. ^_~
Tips we'll go over:
- Lighting
- Setting/Background
- Angles/poses
- Photo adjustments
Tip 1: Lighting is Everything!
I'm going to talk about lighting first, even before choosing a setting! It’s the most important element of taking good selfies. Lighting is everything, lighting is QUEEN!
A well lit image can make your fursuit shine by keeping everything crisp and in focus, so the viewer can really see all the details. If you're photographing in a dark room without adequate lighting the resulting pictures can often be muddy, grainy, and lacking in details. So make sure to let that light bathe you in it's glorious beauty!
You want images that have enough light in them, but you can hit a point where there’s too much light and the image looks washed out. The ideal is an image that looks bright, and shows good detail, and the colors look relatively accurate to what you see with your own eyes.
Probably the best option for lighting is the power of the sun! If you are taking photos during the day you can benefit from being near the window. Better yet, face the window for example, even lighting. Taking photos outside, if weather permits, is also a great option.
What lighting do you have access to in your house? Unless you're a photographer you probably don't have fancy studio lighting, but perhaps you have some lamps that you can move around. Play around with positioning lamps to shine on you during your selfie photo shoot.
They should be set so the light is shining on you, but you should avoid getting them in the shots. Try putting light pointing towards your left and right to provide some even lighting. Put them on one side to create dramatic shadows! Experiment and you’ll probably get some cool images!
If you want to get fancy about it you can order lighting intended for photos. There’s grades of photography lighting - so you can likely buy a cheap set from $50-$150 to try out! Even small lights like a selfie ring can give you a boost.
Tip 2: Select a Good Setting
Choosing a setting is also very important! Your setting may be dictated by the lighting available to you, or by areas of the house available to you, but hopefully you will be able to select a good location or two.
In my personal, very knowledgeable opinion, you need to clean that damn room you’re taking photos in! No one wants to see your smelly laundry pile, or the stack of plates you’re totally going to clean up soon . . . leave me alone mom! You want a presentable background for your photos!
Utilize what you’ve got in your setting! What do you have that shows some character, and says something about you. Do you have a cute plushie you can hold as a prop? What about a wall displaying your character art and badges? Those are great elements to add some flare to your images.
You can also opt to take photos against a solid background. Like a nice clean wall. Or get creative and put up a sheet, fabric, or curtain as a backdrop.
IMPORTANT NOTE!
If you’re spreading out into shared areas then plan ahead and schedule the use of the space.
Standard selfie procedure is holding your phone out as far as you can reach your arm. Further. Further! Your arm is starting to hurt and . . . man, you still can’t fit all of your big ole fursuit head in the picture! If you’re trying to get more images than up close shots then what do you do?
If you happen to own the notorious selfie stick it will really come in handy for fursuit pictures. Go ahead and grab it from the depths of your closet, you don’t need to tell anyone you own one. I won’t tell.
If you have roommates, or live with family members maybe you can drag them into your selfie taking schemes! I mean, they’re probably bored at home too right now, so you’re kinda helping them out.
Unless the images are of a . . . sensual nature. Then it’s definitely weird to include your family, and likely weird to include your roomates. Unless you’re REALLY close.
Finally, there’s propping your camera or phone up! Use a stool, a stack of books, a tower built of legos - whatever you need to get your camera at a good level for photos, and set that timer!
 |
But what do you do about the dreaded hand?!? You know the one. The horrible human hand that you need to set up your camera! There’s the classic put-it-behind-your back shot. Maybe swap hands from time to time. This is going to become obvious over time if you’re taking a lot of photos. |
You may want to extend the timer on your camera to allow for extra time to pull your hand on! If you’re settings allow, you maybe be able to set the camera for taking multiple images in one go so you can get some mileage out of your race get in-shot in time!
Tip 3: Get ALL the Angles!
An ideal image will have you taking up at least 3/4ths of the total image, and a good photoshoot will contain a lot of different poses, and angles. Try getting some close-ups, full body, and bust shots to keep things interesting.
Take lots of images! From many different angles. You will find that some angles look weird, or cause strange distortions - like when you have your snoot close to the camera it will look disproportionately huge.
Unless you have eyelids for your fursuit you usually have just one expression, so try to push yourself to use body language to express what you’re going for in the image. Exaggerate, and feel free to get silly!
Take the time to get a lot of images, you will start to figure out what poses look good with practice. Hopefully you’ll be able to build up an archive of photos to post over a few weeks or months! You'll have an awesome Fursuit Friday for months!
Remember - no one has to see your many, many horrible images! They only have to see the cream-of-the-crop!
Tip 4: Post Photo Adjustments
Most cell phones have built-in adjustment features so you can tweak your images.There’s plenty of computer software and cell phone apps (even free ones) to crop images, or adjust colors to really make your images pop!
Here are a few selfies The Brats took at work of a premade we had (it's sold already).
Share your Selfies!
I hope you’ve found some of these tips helpful, and you know a little more about how to take fursuit selfies.
Go forth and make photos of yourself.
Check out our blog entry for how to enter our Lemonbrat Selfie contest!
The contest starts Tuesday, May 26th and goes till midnight central time on Tuesday, June 2nd!