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Posts tagged ‘Photograph’

May 2

35 Comments

Facebook Tagged Me. I Don’t Want to Be IT.

Have you ever had a moment when you saw a photograph of yourself and had the sickening realization that something BAD is happening to you? Facebook is a forum for those moments, and I had one of them yesterday.

One of the projects my Rotary Club spearheaded is a Net Zero Energy house with Habitat for Humanity. Charles Muldrow, a local architect with a passion for designing and building energy efficient spaces, took on the organization, fundraising and design a project like this requires. Because of his work, we are now building the NZE house in Mt. Pleasant.

Let me just admit it: I cannot stand to do handy projects, because they always reduce me to woeful ineptness in a hurry. I can paint anything, but I am useless with just about anything else. Couple that with the fact that I woke up with a migraine on my appointed day, and working at the NZE house turned into an exquisite form of torture.

I went anyway.

Lou Mello was there, iThingy in tow, snapping photographs to document the day. He took one of me that has to rank in the upper echelon of butt-ugly photos of all-time.

Or, maybe I just don’t like how gigantic my butt LOOKS in it.

I saw it when he uploaded it to Facebook and groaned but left it there. He didn’t tag me, leaving few people to actually witness the real estate occupied by my backside. I sighed with frustrated relief and went on with my life.

Until Charles Muldrow tagged me in the blasted photo today, tying it to my page and leaving it on view for anyone who knows me to see. I don’t want to be vain, but dang, that is one disaster of a photo.

I have only untagged myself in a photo one time on Facebook. It was one of those cartoon collages of heads proclaiming each little picture ‘the happy one’ or ‘the friendly one’ or ‘the explosive one.’ I was tagged as ‘the annoying one’ by this person from high school, something that hurt my feelings much more than it should’ve. After seeing that stupid little cartoon come up in my feed for days and days, I took my name off the thing and went on with my life.

Is it wrong to untag myself simply because I don’t like the way I look in a picture? It feels petty to me, but what do you think?

Too Much is Too Much: Being Fat

Mar 20

31 Comments

The Madness of Instagr.am

I once dated a man who told me that I was a crappy photographer. Back then, I believed pretty much everything he said, and I thought he was right about my picture-taking abilities. At the time, perhaps he was, but I made it my mission in life to be better at pointing a camera and shooting.

Years later, I still suck at photography. A little app called Instagr.am has shown me just how pathetic my skills still are. I downloaded this accursed app to my iPhone a few days ago. It allows people to give status updates through photos and then dress them up with washes and borders. I have taken enough pictures with it to aggravate my mother-in-law and have people start unfriending me again on Facebook for too much chatter.

Because, you see, I am determined to take the perfect photo with it, one that a rock star photographer on there will assign a little heart, the instagr.am version of ‘like.’ At any normal photographic event, I take thousands of photos to get one or two that aren’t awful, so anyone can imagine how annoying I am with this application.

Snap. Preset wash. Update. Locate. Repeat.

I do this CONSTANTLY. For my grand total of eight – yes EIGHT – followers. My photos are so bad that no one wants to follow me. In fact, I am probably chasing people away in droves.

I won’t let it stop me. :)

Too Much is Just Enough: Instagr.am

(PS And if you have a iPhone or an iPad, follow me on instagr.am at andrawatkins.)

Oct 6

30 Comments

Don’t Take My Picture

Photo by Melissa Breeland http://www.PoutyDiva.com

One of the primary things you will notice if you look at many photographs of me – I make weird faces and open my mouth a lot. This isn’t a recent development. When I was really little, I thought smiling was putting on a startled expression and throwing my mouth open as wide as it would go. For my whole life, I’ve been uncomfortable having my photo taken.

Doing wacky things and making ludicrous faces while being photographed has always been my coping mechanism. It’s also one of the main reasons you’ll usually see me with my own camera, taking pictures. If I’m snapping away, I don’t have to be in any of the photos, except for the random ones where I make a face or stick out my tongue.

When Melissa Breeland of PoutyDiva.com asked me if she could photograph me, I cringed momentarily. I knew that she was looking for sitters upon which to build some marketing tools, and I had been following along as she applied her creative touch to the various sessions she’d already posted on her Facebook Like Page.

I also knew that I needed some new photos of me. My hair has been red for most of this year; yet, I have still been using a professional head shot from 2004 when it was blonde and I looked much younger. I started replacing some of my avatars with a random photo that was okay, but, with bikers in the background, it wasn’t truly professional. So, I sighed deeply and agreed to be Melissa’s next victim, I mean model.

Melissa is a natural photographer, but the best thing about her was this: she made me feel okay with everything immediately. On the way to the Old Jail, I had the urge to throw up and knew the vestiges of that sensation lingered on my face when I got there. She quickly got me laughing, and I just relaxed into the whole thing. It was a breeze, leaving me wondering why I worked myself up so much in the first place.

So, thanks to her, I have a new picture for the “Why Cilantro?” page of this blog. It’s today’s photo. The rest are available at Melissa Breeland’s Facebook Page. She can make you look better than you really do in real life, and you’ll laugh all the way through it.

And, she may even let you make faces in some of them and then keep them entirely to herself.

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