photography – The Tragic Queen

As many of you know, each year I do a photoshoot with my best friend Padgett. We take photos that make their way into my holiday cards and onto this blog.

I call it getting my royal portrait made.

It’s always so much fun coming up with how I’m going to do it. I get to pick an aesthetic, I flip through magazines to get inspired, I make a playlist, and I try to cajole my cat into taking one decent photo with me (which goes about as well as it sounds).

This is what we managed to come up with:

A classic black and white photo on a black and white tile floor:

Here’s how they stack up to the black and white photos of years past:

Processed with VSCO with kc25 preset

Here’s the best photo I was able to get of Calypso and me:

Some random photos:

Some BTS photos:

Every year, the front of the card is a royal portrait and every year the back is something fun that I did the year before. This year, I went with a photo of myself at the Golden Gate Bridge, a shot of my beloved cat, and a picture of myself on the cover.

I hope that many of you received a card in the mail, probably getting to you well after all of the holidays are completed.

Happy New Year!

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel

P.S.: Check out my post on all of the books that I read throughout the end of the year.

Singular Royal Portrait

/rɔɪəl pɔːʳtreɪt/ Noun.

A representation of a member of a royal family
A photo shoot I do every year with a friend in order to get a smokin’ hot photo of myself for my blog and holiday card

It was that time of year again, where I take an obnoxious amount of photos of myself for my blog and holiday card and post them for the world to see.

Now, you may have noticed that it is mid-April, but we are just going to ignore that and just enjoy the pictures that I did put on my holiday card, because sometimes, it is hard to get around to posting your royal portrait photos.

Padgett came over for my “royal portrait” photoshoot, bringing with her a special light and her phone. What I wanted this year was to take a picture with my cat– something I assumed wouldn’t be a lofty goal.

I leaned in to take a picture with her. Suspicious of my intentions, she gave chase.

It took us an embarrassingly long amount of time to catch her, which we eventually did by cornering her in my bedroom. The only thing missing was the Benny Hill theme song.

What I was going for:

What I got after cornering my cat:

After still failing to get a decent picture, Calypso darted out of my room. My cat may never forgive me for trying to get a picture with her, despite rescuing her from a 17 cat litter in what I’m pretty sure was a trailer park.

*A photo of us when she still trusted me*

Otherwise, the shoot was lovely. My face was not behaving, but that’s nothing that a little alcohol couldn’t fix. I’m sure that that’s how the real models do it, anyway.

I changed clothes, I played music, and in the end I got some great pictures, with or without my cat’s cooperation.

Shoutout to Padgett for sacrificing life and limb to lean over my bannister to get a picture of me lying on the floor.

BTS

For the original shoot, I wanted the cover to say Happy Holidays, with a nice respectable photo of myself, and then the back to be a messy jumble to prove why we truly needed to be wished luck in the new year.