Do it yourself?
As a gym rat who’s fallen in love with watching her body grown and develop over the years, I have a shocking amount of flexed selfies in my phone, and I know for a FACT that I’m not alone in that. When you see that mega delt pump, or your quads are looking extra thicc after a squat session, or the lighting is just doing something extra fine to your gains, you’ve got to take a swolefie, either just for yourself, or to post on the ‘gram (Because if you didn’t post a photo to your insta, did you really train?).
But the sad thing is, it never looks quite the same on your phone as it did in person. The cuts aren’t quite as defined, that beautiful quad sweep you saw just doesn’t look quite as full, or god forbid, it’s a little blurry because you’re pumped as hell and can’t really hold your phone still.
We want to document our progress, to show off our efforts, to freeze that moment where just looked and felt like a total athlete, and although phone cameras are getting better and better, with greater low light capabilities and higher quality, no matter how hard we try, the gym selfie rarely reflects how good we actually look.
It’s why I see a great importance in professional strength and fitness photography. Even as a photographer, my phone photos will never match up to my professional work. I know how to manipulate available light, angles, and post production to make a selfie pop, but next to my professional work, it just doesn’t stand up.
Last summer I actually took the leap and did a fitness shoot for myself with my fantastic mentor, Damian McGillicuddy. I was very lean, and incredibly proud of my physique, despite all of the photos I’d snapped on my phone, and even the self portraits I’d shot with my pro gear, they just couldn’t quite capture me in my absolute best light. I needed a fellow professional to light and pose me from an alternative perspective, to direct subtle shifts which would take the images to the next level, adjustments which I could never do myself as I simply can’t look at my own body from that perspective.
As you can see, there’s one hell of a difference between the images I shot on my phone, compared to what the photographer I worked with did. I’ve been posed expertly (Because no matter how you pose yourself, a professional eye will see something to tweak to make things even better), and lit to perfection, which has brought out all the gorgeous definition in my muscles. I absolutely ADORE these images.
When you spend as many hours as we do in the gym, we want to document our progress, how our bodies have grown, how our shape has evolved, and it’s why I’ll be going back at some point for an updated shoot, because no matter how many swolefies I take, nothing beats a professional image.
