I’m such a nerd. I really am.
My dream in life is to have an album filled with beautiful candid shots of the people I love most in the world laughing, smiling, thinking, and so on and so forth. It makes me cry thinking of having said album.
I am subscribed to the Photojojo newsletter, which regularly sends articles my way talking about cool things to do with photos and such. I never do anything the articles say because I’m lazy, but that’s beside the point.
One day this newsletter gets sent to me, it is about Long Portraits. I don’t know what “Long Portraits” are, but as I skim the article I read this,
The thing about the best portraits is how they capture the essence of a person… Ask the person a question. Have them sing you their favorite song. Whatever. We 100 percent guarantee you’ll end up with a great living portrait.
I read this and process it as this, “I will get a great ‘long portrait’ (whatever that is) by having someone sing a song or answer a question and snapping pictures as they do. I will be able to capture the beautiful candid shot of my dreams! Perfect!”
For some reason I remembered this little trick this afternoon, and decided to try it out with my Photo Booth.
This is me singing “Mary had a Little Lamb”
“I’m a Little Teapot”
The “A,B,C’s”
Hmm… this wasn’t exactly what I was thinking when I thought about “capturing the essence” of a person…
I continued my Photo Booth activity and decided to say “prune” the way the Olsen twins are rumored to do.
“Pruuunnnee”
Do I look like an obscenely rich munchkin now?
Ok, back to the point…
After spending a good 20 minutes trying to “capture my essence” (how the blasted thing keeps escaping is beyond me), I decide to look up the Photojojo article to see what I missed… because I obviously missed something (refer to above photos).
It’s a 30-second (or less) portrait of a person, kind of like a video snapshot. It lets you capture the essence of a person: not just what they look like, but who they are right now…So you ask a question or two, get a little video, badda bing badda boom. Moment captured.
Well, crap. It wasn’t a portrait, it was a video!
Other than feeling like a doofus for not reading all the directions before trying the handy dandy experiment, I was actually quite relieved that the above pictures are not my essence! Because I like to believe my essence looks more like this
Herbal Essence!
(check out that beautician level flat iron action!)
