An Obligatory Pictures Post

Pictures came up in conversation the other day with some of my twitter friends (Laura Zera and Lorna Suzuki to be exact) and I mentioned I haven't tried to take a selfie yet because I take horrible enough pictures WITHOUT being my own photographer. I'd just make it worse by being the photographer. They'd be horrible. They'd be so bad they'd rend a whole in the fabric of space time.

Well Lorna doesn't believe me, so I thought I'd provide proof.

I don't take good pictures. And I mean that in every sense of the phrase. I suck at being a photographer. When I'm taking pictures of my daughter for any given length of time,  I always find I delete about half of them for blurriness or she looked down too fast or any number of reasons. It's not a skill with which I am very adept.

I also suck at getting my picture taken. Like really suck at it. Like I've had my husband almost turn to drugs and alcohol in order to get through a picture taking section. It's not good. 

Here's what happens on any particular picture taking escapade. When I'm asked to smile, I immediately start to over-compensate and I unhinge my jaw like I'm a boa constrictor about to devour an entire bird. My husband calls this phenomena Pterodactyl-ing it, and it happens, oh about every third picture I take. So then I over-compensate for THAT by barely smiling with my mouth and then trying to smize (Smiling with my eyes. Thanks Tyra Banks.) but I always take that too far and going into to what I call Manson-lamps territory. My eyes are big and they are scary. The third picture I usually get distracted by my daughter or something out of range and I'm not even looking at the camera at all. Wash, rinse, repeat.

That happens just about every time I try to take a picture. It's not a full ten on the pterodactyl scale. Probably a six, but it still ain't good. This includes bonus 'baby ain't look at the camera action' as well as 'welcome to fly-away city population pterodactyl. I mean, what was my hair doing. "Alright she's distracted. A strand of us will make a break for it. We'll call you from the outside. Godspeed." Both of those things only add to the picture-take problems. We've only on the rarest of occasions both been facing a camera with decent looks on our faces with my hair deciding to play nice. It's just not good.

And then you have the terror that is the Manson-lamps phenomena which makes my pterodactyl face look like an exercise in restraint. The very next picture that got snapped was this one. See what I mean?  I brought the teeth down but all the manic energy residing in my mouth agape smile when straight to my eyes.  I look like one of the creepy men from that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where nobody can talk and those guys come at you all eyes and smiles, very happy to perpetrate the horrors they are about to administer on your bodily person.  Even my daughter was giving the camera a 'I don't know about this person' look.

But the bunny ears were adorable.


That's not to say that taking a good picture is not a quality which I possess. Once in  blue moon I'm capable of not unhinging my jaw, not giving off manson-lamps and looking at the camera in one foul swoop. I mean, look at this picture. I look normal! Put together even. It's miraculous when it happens, let me tell you. The sun rays peak out from the clouds and the gates of heaven open. It's an awesome thing. But these pictures are few and far between. I mean this picture? Taken last year, by a professional photographer who had to coax that smile out of me slowly. It's a process to get me to take a good picture is what I'm saying, a long drawn out process requiring copious amounts of patience, or barring that, copious amounts of alcohol.

9 times out of ten I look constipated or surprised. Sometimes it's a combination of the two. (Actually, in this photo I'd say it's more of a combination of scared and constipated, or scared I'm not going to be constipated for much longer. I'll let you be the judge. )

Now I could delve deeper in the horrors that is my personal photo collection. But I think you should just take my word for it here on out, and if you ever do take my picture, brace yourself for the horrors that await you on the other side.

..... I'm sorry.