I’ve never been a particularly photogenic person. I blame my dad.

See, my dad’s an old photography guy. He used to have a dark room and everything (in an old Airstream trailer in the backyard, if I remember correctly). He’s actually quite good. He’s taken any number of competition-level photos. I say “competition-level” assuming that people actually have competitions about that sort of thing; it’s entirely possible they do not. Either way, he’s good at taking pictures.

I also used to be — and some would say still am — extremely cynical and misanthropic. Well, perhaps those aren’t really the right words for it. Maybe it’s more correct to say, “I used to be a teenager.” So, during adolescence, as you can imagine, I hated having my picture taken. My dad would have to force me to do it, usually bribing me morally by telling me my grandfather would appreciate it or something. God forbid he bribe with with something like money. But I digress.

He’d set up these little photo shoots in our front yard. Now, I wasn’t such a disenchanted suburban youth that I refused to smile for these photos; on the contrary, I had no problem smiling. Occasionally I would even do this sincerely, which if you know anything about being 17 you’d realize is quite the rare feat indeed. But therein lies the proverbial rub: my smile was, apparently, “wrong”.

See — and pardon my further digression here — I used to have big eyes. Perhaps it’s only an illusion furthered along by the Hubble-telescope-lens grade eyeglasses I wore as a child, but I do believe this to be true. At the age of 15, I was mercifully fitted for contact lenses. This had a striking impact on everything from my romantic life (which went from non-existant with no hope whatsoever to non-existant with a slight chance of smooching) to my athletic ability (which went from marginally above average to marginally above average but at least you don’t look like a complete and utter tool whilst playing).

Getting contacts also shrunk my eyes. Well, it didn’t actually shrink them, but I hold firm to the belief that the contacts make my upper (and perhaps lower, but it’s not as obvious) eyelids hang down lower. I could come up with any number of reasons why this is plausible, but they’d be just about as medically valid as my mother saying “well, there’s something going around” every time I come up with a sniffle. So we’ll just take this on faith.

Back to the smile. Apparently — as my dad was so quick to point out — when I smile, my eyes squint. Now obviously there’s some sort of physiological explanation for this — I also tend to close my eyes when I sneeze, and so far no one’s complained about that — but doing so seemed to put a severe dent in the overall aesthetic my dad was going for in these snapshots. My squinting, combined with my now “smaller”, eyes meant that if I was smiling in a photo, often times my eyes seemed completely shut.

As a result of all of this nonsense, there is a 6 year period (approximately titled “college”) wherein I am not smiling in a single picture. I’m doing my best to pose, sure, but I’m not smiling. I’m giving this little closed-mouth smirk thing. It’s really not all that pleasant to look at. A smile, squinty or not, would be much better.

As a result of that I started shying away from the camera, ending up in many fewer pictures than normal. This is severly unfortunate, as you’d figure college as the one time where you’d actually want some sort of physical evidence of all the hi-jinx you may have gotten up to. At least that seems to be the case. Everyone I know has picture-collage after picture-collage of them doing all sorts “crazy” things. Usually involving a funny hat. Straw hats and sombreros seem to be popular choices. Why that is is a blog for another day.

At any rate, when I finally got a digital camera, I vowed to take tons of pictures. But not of other people (or even of things). No, I vowed to take tons of pictures of me. I figured I had to make up for lost time. And for awhile I did okay. I took lots of pictures. Granted, most of these were “extendo-arm” self portraits, but at least it was a start. (For the uninitiated, “extendo-arm” self portraits are those pictures you take where you hold up the camera at arm’s length and take a picture of yourself. In my case, these are usually take with some unsuspecting — and often disinclined — person in the crook of my armpit. So pretty much good times all around). The problem with these pictures, other than the obvious, is that these pictures rarely turn out “good”. Or, you know, “competition worthy”.

Likely because of this, or perhaps because I simply haven’t mastered the art of saying “hey, could you take a picture of us?”, I sorta stopped taking pictures at social gatherings. I’d have my camera with me, sure, but it’d just be taking up space in my pocket.

Why do I bring any of this up? Well, as you might expect, I brought my camera with me to a party I went to last Saturday night. When I got home, I realized I had taken all of two pictures, neither of which I was in.

I’d apparently snapped this:

and this:

Yes, I decided the best possible thing I could do with my camera was take before and after snaps of a midget picking some dude up. Sheer genius, obviously, if only for the non-squinty eyes.