Thursday, January 5, 2012

Day 1534 - Picture Problems


Digital cameras are great and awful.  They're great because you can take as many pictures as you want, and they're awful because you can take as many pictures as you want.  Sometimes I yearn for the days when you had to wait a week to pick up your photos from the lab to find out that only 7 of your 24 pictures were actually good.  The remaining seventeen were usually out of focus, poorly lit, or painful reminders of how hideous teenage skin can be.

With the advent and popularity of digital cameras, the results are immediate and polished.  You can do a burst of ten photos and pick the best one.  Or you can use a photo editing program to erase embarrassing blemishes like a zit or Crazy Gaga's entire face.

Over the holiday break, I probably ended up taking over six hundred photos and deleted about a hundred of them.  But I probably delete photos a little differently from most because I like to keep the bad expressions and horrid group shots.  To me, they are just as -- if not more -- interesting than your standard smile or candid shot.  Who really wants to see another group shot of perfectly smiling family members when you can get a picture with an out of focus cousin in the background smoking a bong?

As I went through the pictures of Emma and Andrew I realized how different they are at taking pictures.  Emma really knows how to smile and pose for the camera.  And Andrew has a great natural smile, but his forced smile borders on the side of a diarrhea seizure.

But they each have their own Achilles' Heel when it comes to photos:  Emma always has her hair in her face, and Andrew will have a contorted expression.  I put together a couple of photos taken over the holiday break and put them into a collage to prove my point:

 

1 comment:

Susan Tajii said...

Andrew looks like Moji in a lot of the pictures!