Smile! Click.
I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING.
“What the heck is that?”
I grant you that it looks like a photo of some lint that I took with my phone while it was in my pocket. It isn’t. I’ve taken pictures of my lint and it looks better than this.
Courtesy of NASA – This is the first color photograph ever taken of Pluto (you know, that place that used to be a planet) and its moon, Charon. If this a “color” photo I must assume that the colors are black and white.
I can’t help but think that if Pluto was still an official dues paying planet NASA would have taken a better picture. But from 71 million miles, or whatever, this is as good as you’re going to get.
It has crossed my mind that maybe NASA’s camera screwed up and this really nothing more than some pelican crap that got plopped onto the camera lens during launch from Cape Kennedy. Now that I look at it a little more closely I can also see a passing resemblance to my late Aunt Nellie and Uncle Paul.
Photography is a rather “iffy” thing. First developed around 1840 in France it quickly became all the rage. As a result we have 175 years of portraits of ugly people, blurry vacation photos and more kitten pictures than the internet can handle.
From what I have read, the very first photograph ever taken was of a church steeple in Paris. The most recent one is of the guy who just ran the red light at the intersection outside St. Arbucks.
Whole lives are documented in photographs. Billions of baby pictures are stuffed into wallets around the world, and on Facebook there are millions of people posting pictures of their lunches, for God’s sake.
The earliest picture of myself that is still around shows me in my mother’s arms in a little “onesie” that makes look like a forerunner of the Teletubbies. Everyone says it is cute – I find it vaguely disturbing.
I have seen snapshots of myself at various Christmas morning and family celebrations. In my opinion, I look like a refugee from “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” (Look it up. It’s called Literature.)
I was chubby child. I was a chubby adolescent. I am a chubby Geezer, but compared to the folks I see tooling up and down the aisles at Wal-Mart, I’m not too bad. At least I don’t need to file an Environmental Impact Statement each time I go outside.
Over the years I have dropped a lot of cash paying people to take my picture. 8 X 10 Glossies – the ubiquitous publicity “headshots” passed out like candy by every performer. Serious looking headshots for dramatic roles, whimsical headshots for comedy, “fourshots” showing you with various looks for when you don’t know what is needed – which is most of the time.
I think I might have done better if I had used NASA to take my headshots.
Photography at its best is an Art. Unfortunately, most of the time it is an invitation to “Fondue, and slides of our trip to Sea World.”
At its worst it is on my Driver’s License.
Down the Hall on Your Left 