Dappled in yellow lighting and adorned with chunky sparkles, a face looks up to a point beyond the camera. The expression is hard-to-read: it’s not emotionless, yet it lacks the extremity of the banal emotions we know — happiness, sadness, anger.

The events that transpired over the course of this year’s spring break were entirely new to me. Usually, on any free day I get, I can be found either at Philz Coffee or in one of the stores lining Santana Row. Actually, this break, you may have found me in Boston, touring Harvard, Boston University or Tufts, just like any other second-semester junior.

Yet, because of the pandemic, we’re all stuck at home. No shopping, college-touring or eating out. Any time I stepped further than my front porch, I was greeted by what looked like a ghost town: aside from a lone dogwalker, no neighbors were to be found on the streets, the parks were emptied and the usually-bustling square of the Los Altos downtown was eerily silent.

So, just like everyone else I knew, I needed to figure out what to do with all my spare time. Ordinary activities like Netflix, baking and video games only fill up so many hours. When I’d worn those activities down, I turned to a long-term project I was in the midst of. Right now, in Advanced Graphic Arts, each member of our class of six is creating a promptless, self-assigned project; the direction each of us goes in is completely up to the artist. Originally, I’d planned to do a photoshoot with a friend for the work, but the shelter-in-place order destroyed any hopes I’d had of procuring either a model or a setting.

My photography usually centers on the presence of other people: my portfolio is chock-full of faces that aren’t my own. That’s true for a lot of photography — street, environmental, and traditional, among others — you’ll rarely see the artist’s face in their own work.

In quarantine, we just have ourselves. So I used my time in isolation to see if I could do it all: be both model and photographer. By wrapping my desk lamp with colored tissue paper, I was able to create golden lighting, and I even used a stack of old AP and SAT prep books to create a makeshift tripod. Using the self-timer feature on my camera, I was able to create a photoshoot using only myself.

I ended up doing three shoots to represent three emotions: determination, melancholy and euphoria. Each one took me close to three hours, but I learned that I didn’t really need anything besides myself — I could do my own makeup, create my own setting and pose for myself.

Forcing myself to adapt to this situation broke down a barrier I’d always subconsciously held. Although I love doing photoshoots, I used to carry a feeling of apprehension and reluctance when I knew I had to do one: between scheduling, commute to the location and the photoshoot itself, photography felt like a huge chore. And it was — the whole event usually took four to five hours, plus editing. The last one I did, which was with a friend in Main Street Cupertino, took as long, and I worried about tiring her out too: standing in the same way, with only subtle changes in movement, is exhausting. On my own, however, I didn’t need to think about that: I could make tiny changes until I had it the way I wanted. Knowing now that I can create all on my own in just a couple of hours is a good feeling to have, like I have art just sitting in the corner of my room, waiting to be brought to life.