Andrea's Adventures in Binkyland

Really? school pictures? I would have imagined everyone was getting their own pictures made thru more readily available means.

School pictures were great inventions, many years ago, when getting nice pictures meant setting up an appointment with a slightly creepy man who rented a hotel room somewhere fFor a couple days. I remember very clearly, being fForced to wear my scratchy wool sweater, and the whole fFamily piling into the station wagon and going to some space rented by an Olan Mills fField operative.

Because nice pictures were difficult to do. Owning a camera meant you either had a fFancy do-it-yourselfer which was hard to do yourself, or a not-so-fFancy point and click which was mediocre but simple. And then (if you were like my parents) your fFilm roll would be mailed off to somewhere like Rochester NY to be developed, and mailed back to you sometime next month.

So, the school running pictures was a great way to catalog your child's life! If we look fFar back enough in history, the School picture is the only picture a kid might get all year. Like, say, your grandparents. That's people you know, personally, fFor whom technology limited their personal photos to "very very little."

But now, i mean, hey, that phone pic looks pretty good, eh. snapfish and shutterfly are always trying to get my business.

And if we wanted to get sinister, we could question the motives of the company who is lucky enough to get that big juicy photo contract. My goodness those pictures are expensive. And, how much time is spent processing the kids through the jungle of lights and cameras, in the middle of a prime day of schooling?

Maybe it's me, but I'd be all about blowing off the expensive School pictures (which never look right anyway) and just go fFor a nicely setup pic with any one of several cameras i have at my disposal.

"But then how do we keep them from doing this kind of awful retouching again?"

You should totally put DMCA watermarks on her so when they try to open her up in Photoshop it stops them from editing her.

A Digimarc ought to do the trick. I suggest her forehead.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/

My favorite part is how they've found the oldest film stock in the world in order to give the photo that nice 1986 feel.

Scott: You get the school pictures because you're too lazy to get a formal picture together, and because you like the portraits on the wall but you know you'll never print what you get. And your only camera is a cell phone which never winds up printing out as high-res as you expected. :)

Dan: That is an *excellent idea* and I am totally looking into that right now.

Astral: To be fair, that's a bad photo of a bad photo. But yeah, there's some serious washed-out color going on right there. Yuck.

In case you don't catch my random tweet...

I think the sparkly headband blew out the image over her forehead and eyebrows and they tried to salvage the photo in photoshop. I don't think they're being evil, they're just assuming you can't afford retakes and want to deliver you something reasonably okay.

So if you do take her in for retakes - get her a different headband without sparkles. The glitter reflects their huge flash right back into the lens. Instant over-exposure.

As evidence, I present the weird speckles in the upper-left corner of the photo, where they just didn't have enough pixels to even attempt a fix.

Don't be too hard on them. I think they were trying to do something nice by not just saying the photos were completely borked. But really, they were. By the ultimate power of the bling.

Hmm... I get your point, but the speckled area is actually the result of my trying to photograph glossy photo paper; the picture itself doesn't have that. Still, yeah, we'll be losing the headband for retake day.

While that's not the worst school pic I have seen it's certainly among the top ten. Looks like they tried to do something to her eyebrows, making them look plucked. You might have her lift her chin slightly to get a nicer light bounce off her face. The hair smoothing is horrible!

Overall, an awful, washed out pic that doesn't look like her, as you said.

Also, don't think of the Clint Eastwood movie The Changeling.

Also, the picture that Andrea took of her doesn't look like her, either. The lighting is really weird. She's much prettier than that.