There isn’t much of anyone nowadays who doesn’t need a good picture of themselves. With all the social sites on the web, you are bound to want a picture, or avatar to upload.

The avatar to the left is one I created on a site, that I’m sorry to say I don’t remember the url for anymore. But if you google “create avatar” I’m sure you’ll find plenty of them. If it’s a sort of generic look you are going for.

If you want an actual picture of yourself, that’s not difficult to do if you have, or can borrow, a digital camera. Here is the key: take LOTS of pictures. Just pose and snap. Check out the angle, the lighting and distance. Change what you don’t like and snap some more. You probably aren’t going to get one you like within the first 25 snaps. Keep going!

This is a picture I took of myself to use for more serious applications – when I want to look professional.

For some reason I find that my hair looks flatter in pictures than it actually is. So, I usually have to go fluff it up and put hair spray on it to get the right look in the picture. Or you might have to open a window to get some natural light in. Play with the flash on your camera, too. Try no flash, automatic flash and the custom settings. Just keep playing til everything comes together and you get a picture you want.

Most social sites allow only a small image to be uploaded. So try to get the shot of yourself as close up as possible. If you shoot it far away and then it gets resized to a small photo, your face will hardly be recognizable. So start out with a head shot that’s clear.

This is another I took that I use for more fun places.

If you don’t want your face to be recognizalbe but still want a photo to upload, think of symbols or other images that might represent you.  A piece of your artwork scanned can make a nice avatar.  A part of your body that isn’t recognizable as you might be nice.  Or a shot of your face that doesn’t completely make you recognizable can be nice.

This image was taken by Denise Mihalik and I tweaked it in Photoshop. I use it at times when I dont’ want to show my face.

I’m working on some Photoshop videos that will help you learn how to remove backgrounds from photos as well as using different features to spruce up your pics! So stay tuned.

Mert Erkal of searchforblogging.com has featured Creative Clown in the latest edition of Bloghology. His interview questions were fresh and I enjoyed it very much.   You can download Bloghology and read mine and other interesting folk’s interviews here.

Oh my gosh! It has been a nightmare just to get my site back up. I was never able to import the database with my old posts. I am going to try to enter them manually a little at a time.

And now I’m having trouble getting my shop to work.

I had snagged a dreamhost.com button and was going to advertise the hell out of them a week ago because the tech guy, Jason, that was working with me was so great. But they kept passing me from one tech to another. I’d have to start over explaining what was going on, and then each guy would have a different opinion on what they should and could do. So, they never did fix anything!

At least I was able to get it back to the point where I can post again. It really upsets me because I’ve been with dreamhost for several years. I love their company and their fairness. I’ve always had great response from their tech support people but they need a policy where one tech helps a customer to see that the job is actually done.

Update:  I found the simplest way to replace my blog posts was to copy them from my feed reader.  After I had done several of them I realized that this is probably causing new posts to go into the feed.  I apologize to my subscribers if this caused you to receive repeats of all the old posts.