THE Photo

Today, I tried to have the photo taken. You know the one. It's the picture of you that strangers will see when they open up the facebook for your business school. It's the image of you that will appear on your student id card. It's the photo that you will see everyday for the next two years of your life. Usually, you don't even know how these all-important photos turn out until it is far too late to do anything about them. The Department of Motor Vehicles doesn't allow you to bring in a photo that you can be proud of, so you end up with a picture on your driver's license that makes you launch into excuses whenever a friend asks to see it. "Oh, I was really tired that day." - or - "Oh, I hadn't been out of my apartment in, like, fifteen years. That's why I'm really pale and wearing a paisley mock-turtleneck." Other organizations are equally unsympathetic when it comes to how you look in your photo. Chances are, your employer doesn't allow you to sit for multiple photographs then pick and choose the acceptable ones when it comes to getting your building access badge. Did your undergraduate institution or gym give you any flexibility when it came to how you looked on your id cards? Of course not.

When I found out that Yale used the passport-sized photos we sent in for the facebook and student id card, I heaved a sigh of relief. Finally, I will be able to produce for inspection a form of identification that doesn't make me feel like some horribly deformed freak everytime I look at it. The rub? If you don't photograph well, you can spend the better part of a day trying to eliminate this as a variable.

I left the house this morning determined to work with a single photographer. After doing some research, I decided on a place downtown that advertised a better passport photo. I sat for two different photos. I looked terrible in both of them. "Why does my right ear look like it's trying to detach itself from my head?" "Where is my upper lip in this photo?" "Why do I look pickled in this one?" I walked out the photographer's "studio" frustrated and without the perfect photo.

I tried several other photographers. Every picture seemed worse than the one before it.

After spending the entire morning and early afternoon trying to take the perfect picture, I opted instead to Photoshop a photo I had taken six months ago. I spent six hours erasing the background, adding fill layers, changing the blending options, adjusting the brightness, increasing the contrast, blurring and sharpening to get just the right look. By the time I finished, it occured to me that the final image looked almost nothing like me. And it was then that I realized that that was probably what I was going for all day. Epiphany! So that's why nobody could get it right?!

I printed the picture on some photo paper, trimmed it, and mailed it out along with my enrollment verification and deposit check. I hope my classmates recognize me from the facebook. LOL! Hey, at least I'll have a student id that I can display with pride.