Our inclination these days is not only to capture a moment, but to capture the best version of that moment. If you're anything like us, that means you end up with approximately 30 versions of the exact same photo and sometimes one is kinda sorta decent. We don't have single moments in time captured. Given the quantity of photos, we have entire scenes. I'm sure we could easily do some sort of stop motion animation sequence... The title could be 'Funny Face,' or 'Seriously, How Did I Not Get At Least One Of You Smiling?'
The problem with that many choices is that you become quite fixated on the negative. Oh, her eyes could be more open, they aren't standing close enough, bad head angle, he's looking away, half of you have sunglasses on and half don't, can you bend a little more in the front so I can see the sign behind you, etc. And I don't actually think the final product is any rival to the single shot variety that now has become infamous for its imperfection. I can take 25 pictures of three children sitting together to get a half decent one. But aren't the ones where one kid was making a funny face, one was looking away, and one looks perfect great photos too?
I don't feel like the photos we took are any less special or valuable because they weren't all instant frame-rs. The ability to take more has us taking more, but the excess does not always bring success. So why do we keep doing it? If someone was talking or something obviously went wrong, I understand re-taking a photo. But the entire memory of our computer is being used for photos that are a mix bag of decent, totally suck, kind of suck and OK, maybe I could actually share that one. It's just too much.
Don't even get me started on the anxiety of picking a holiday card. Having professional photos taken has to be worth its weight in stress. We didn't have any professional shots taken last year, and come December, with the frustration of several amateur "photo shoots" of our own still fresh in my mind, I considered just finding a stand-in kid to send out to our loved ones. I ended up going with a collage of fair-to-decent pictures to show a melange of the kid, who I actually think is quite cute in person. In pictures, well, not so much.
It's not that I'm being tough on her... it really is quite something:
| "The Fat Face" does seem to be her "Blue Steel" go-to |