And in the Aw, What The Hell category...

[darkemeralds]

Not long ago, I challenged ravurian to get a photograph of himself at his most fabulous, and I said I would do the same. While we wait for Mr. R...






I don't know whether this is the most flattering picture, but I liked it the best of all the ten zillion I took trying to get something I could bear. I think it speaks the most truth about me.

Honestly, I wouldn't have posted these three weeks ago. Things are converging, and I'm growing down into my real, actual, 55-year-old self, so I figure I might as well show my face around here.

Comments

Re: The Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts

[darkemeralds]

Oh, I'm glad you like that second one. I wasn't sure how it would come across to people who've never met me. When I looked at it small, in my camera, I thought it was ambiguous whether I was crying or laughing, and that's what I liked about it. Nobody reaches this age without having learned how close together those things are in life.

One of the problems with regular snapshots and candids is that for a lot of us, the camera emphasizes what the eye edits out, and doesn't capture personality or spirit very well (lucky the photogenic person who gets the opposite effect). It's so shocking to feel one looks pretty good, or at least acceptable, then to see a photograph that is nothing but dark circles and sagging jowls, puffy cheeks and wrinkles and hooded eyes (not to mention "figure flaws"). I deleted literally dozens of pictures like that to get two showing something like the person I see in the mirror on a good day.