Old Things That Are Tough To Explain: You Could Only Take One Picture

First of all, I want to apologize to famous author Edgar Allan Poe. I’m using a well-known picture of him because he’s dead and hopefully won’t care if I’m using his bad picture as an example. When I’m dead, I won’t care if somebody pulls out all my bad photos from the closet and uses them as examples either. Edgar Allan Poe looks drunk and depressed in this picture, but he supposedly was drunk and depressed a lot.

I wonder if Edgar Allan Poe got mad when he saw the above portrait. Did he want it redone? Or maybe he was drunk when he saw it and thought he looked great. Maybe he did look great by 1850 standards. From what I understand, people didn’t smile for pictures back then. Maybe that was a typical 1850 smile. I wasn’t around back then, so I don’t know.

I mention Edgar Allan Poe’s bad portrait because I took a lot of pictures a few weekends ago. At least, a lot of photos of me were taken that weekend when I went to a parents’ event at my daughter’s college campus , and it was a lot of fun, but, damn, my daughter and her friends wanted to take a lot of pictures.

Even though a few of the pictures we took with our phones came out pretty good, for every good picture we took, my daughter and I deleted at least 10. A 10-to-1 ratio in the old days of photography would have been horrible. It’s great that today we can delete bad pictures of ourselves, but it hasn’t always been like that.

For most of my life, you could only take one picture at a time with our old cameras. Taking a picture used to be a lot of pressure because you had only one chance to get it right. One muscle tic in your cheeks, a mistimed closed eye, or a tingle in your nose, and you were screwed. Back then, we would pose, not knowing if our heads were tilted at the best possible angle. We couldn’t tell if our faces were doing what we thought our faces were doing.

That was a problem because I usually took lousy pictures. I often had my eyes closed. Or I was looking the wrong way. Or I looked drunk. I made Edgar Allan Poe look good. I can sympathize with Edgar Allan Poe because I look drunk in a lot of my old pictures, but at least I looked like a happy drunk.

Taking a bad photo could be traumatizing. Family members and friends would mock you for imperfections in pose or facial expressions. You couldn’t just rip the pictures up because that wasn’t fair to other people in them. Yeah, sometimes people destroyed photos they didn’t like, but it was wrong to do because photos were so rare.

When we took pictures with developed film, we would wait days or weeks before we could see how we messed up our faces. We would take bets over who screwed up the photos the most. Then there were the instant photos. You could do retakes with the instant photos, but the film was limited. And most of the time you weren’t taking pictures of yourself, so you didn’t care if somebody else had a drunken expression. You only cared if it was you.

Now I can relax a little since I know I can get rid of any photo that turns out flawed. Most of my current pictures show me smiling like a normal person. I didn’t have to get surgery or go to a psychologist. I just needed the chance to take as many photos as possible before I got a decent shot.

*****

A few years ago when my parents passed away, I rediscovered a bunch of scrapbooks filled with pictures taken over the last 80 years. Some of the photos were yellowed and disintegrating. Others were remarkably preserved. I noticed that a lot of people in my family looked drunk, but they were often holding various cans, bottles, and glasses in the pictures, so they actually could have been drunk.

I think they had the right idea, holding alcoholic drinks while taking photos. Alcohol, even if you’re not drinking it, takes the stress out of posing. From now on, I think I’ll hold an empty beer can whenever I have to take a picture in public. Then everybody who sees it will remark that I look amazingly sober for a drunk guy.

*****

For more “Old Things That Are Tough To Explain,” go to Old Things That Are Tough To Explain: The Home Page.

*****

After more than ten years of blogging, I’ve finally written a novel.

A grammar-obsessed English teacher falls in ‘luuuvvv’ but discovers how chaotic and dangerous ‘luuuvvv’ really can be.

The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy is now available on Amazon and from the trunk of my car at various local bookstores… until parking lot security kicks me out. Buy it now while supplies last!