Desiree Sydow Photography

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Desiree Sydow Photography

Fine art photographer creating evocative self-portraits. Photography blogger and content creator

06/02/2026

Another new image from the series I’m working on :-) I promise they’re not all this dark 😂

30/01/2026

“Transcendence”
The third image in my new series is done! This one was shot on Rollei infrared film and with an infrared filter.
Definitely one of the most challenging self portraits I’ve ever done - first of all, shooting on film is tricky when you can’t be behind the camera, plus the infrared filter causes a focus shift, meaning I had to focus just in front of where I was sitting. What do you think?

02/12/2025

I took this self portrait some years ago spontaneously in Riga, Latvia, during a brief moment where a passing rain cloud caused beautiful, soft backlighting ❤️

27/11/2025

Old self portrait I found on my hard drive today.
This pretty much encapsulates how I feel when OTHER people take my picture! Ironically (or maybe not?) for a self portrait photographer, I’m pretty camera shy 🙈

12/11/2025

“Stillness”.
This self portrait is part of a new series created using mixed media/alternative processes.

To create it, I printed my digital image using the cyanotype printing technique and rescanned it, then added additional textures in Photoshop.

If you swipe through the images, you can see the original cyanotype.

The last two images are the cyanotype print in a milk bath, as well as a water-sprayed inkjet print of the image, which I both used to create a ghostly effect in the final image.

📷

28/10/2025

Playing around with my favourite accessory again, the white mist soft focus filter 🥹
Also added some painterly highlights using Dodge and Burn 🎨

27/10/2025

“Dizzy”
This is one of these older self portraits where I just have a vague idea, but don’t really know where to take the editing.
The raw image has been sitting on my hard drive for over a year… and then today, I finally decided what to do with it:
It desperately needed a dizzying circus vibe 🤡🎪🎠
The disorientating effect was achieved using the spherical distortion effect and radial blur/spin.

15/10/2025

“Hope”
This self portrait completes the example images I will include in my new book (coming soon), a creative prompt book for self portrait artists.
This image required a lot of fake snow, a fake magnolia flower, and some experiments in Midjourney to create a frosted magnolia backdrop. Not sure I 100% succeeded with the faux snow effect but it was fun to try 🌨️☃️❄️

04/10/2025

“Blue”
This is one of a range of new self portraits I’m creating for my new book, “The Self Portrait Deep Dive”, which will contain lots of reflective, creative self portrait prompts and projects. Also, it’s a great excuse to make new work 😂

30/09/2025

Black and white self portrait shot on film. I didn’t bring my remote so I had exactly ten seconds to run back from the camera and drape myself onto the bench 😂

12/09/2025

I shot a self portrait today on digital as usual, but I also did a few shots with a film camera on expired film from 2009…and it came out with this beautiful rose colour shift!! I love a happy accident 😍

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http://www.desireesydow.com/

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