I take my own photo every day. A bunch of my pals followed suit and we ramped it up a notch yesterday by forming a group of self portraitists who are willing to take risks and push each other. We double dog dare each other to take our photographs to a new level. I started with the first double dog dare to take a self portrait of yourself dead.

It turns out that appearing dead is a lot harder than you would think. I started by making a fake bullethole in my head with liquid latex and makeup. I tried looking dead on the kitchen floor, in the bedroom and in the bath and it didn’t look real. My eyes looked alive, my stare wasn’t vacant enough and my pose didn’t have that special post-death-muscle-lockup feel.

So I washed my face and thought outside the box and set up an accident scene in the street at 2 AM.

How can you appear dead in your own self portraits? Here’s a start based on conversations and chats and observations. If you’ve got your own suggestions, leave them in the comments.

If you want to look dead…

1. Choose how you are going to die. Method acting may work for you.
2. Practice a vacant stare, become empty, feel like you have no soul and you stand a better chance of looking that way.
3. Show signs of a struggle, dieing isn’t easy.
4. Leave clues for the watcher as to what you were doing in the scene in the first place.
5. Take lots of photos, sometimes the ones you don’t expect to look dead in are really spooky.
6. Use basic composition rules like the rule of thirds, including diagonals, and break up the space so that there are different things happening in different planes.
7. Over the top can work.
8. If you still don’t look dead, it may help to not have your eyes in frame.