Worst Professor Ever

Some things in life you can’t do for yourself, and getting good photos of yourself is one of them. You will need someone to hover over you and put you in flattering poses and worry about light and take eight million pictures so at least a few turn out okay. Only a professional is going to put up with all that, so you may as well just hire one.

About once every ten years I feel the need to get some sort of documentation of how I look. I keep it rare because a) I don’t think it’s ethical to torture photographers more often than that and b) I really don’t like having my picture taken.

I warn the photographer (the unfearing Katie Jo of Green Wheels Studios)  that I simply don’t relax in front of cameras. I’m all too aware that the camera doesn’t love me, and always chooses to document the moment when my teeth are looking particularly enormous, or my already-down-turned mouth is somehow twisting in two different directions, or my eyebrows are doing something unseemly. As photographer friend once observed (kindly) “Your face has a lot of microexpressions.”

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Case in point. I put it in black and white (that screams "serious" right?) on my LinkedIn profile

This is as close to professional as I get. Power pose, or "Are you looking at me, kid?" You decide.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I mind the grimace-prone rubber face in real life, I just know it doesn’t photograph well.

(By the way, in case you’re wondering: in a weird compromise of aesthetics, these have no Photoshop but I’m wearing plenty of makeup, including the best foundation primer money can buy. Pretty much the opposite of all those “models without makeup” photoshoots in magazines. Bring on the new verism, kiddos, because I’ve decided my dark under-eye circles merely look Frenchy and noir.)

Katie Jo does on-location urban shots, so we shoot in what we think is an abandoned building, though we are surprised by some workmen about halfway through. (She says they’ve been asking about me.) She’s got her work cut out for her, but she’s a trooper and gets some very cool shots of the architecture in addition to me.

But here’s my favorite picture from the whole event:

I like this because my nose looks just about the right size and I have my typically skeptical expression that I’ve always assumed is cute. Then my mom told me my smile “didn’t look very sincere”, which explains a lot about why I have a difficult time in the world.

Then, when I started incorporating the picture into the site, I figured I’d better tweak the design. I’m too lazy to make a mood board for my own stuff, I just went with the blue-red-yellow theme.

My students got this expression a lot. It's like a super-charged version of Seth Meyer and Amy Poehler's "Really?"

This one's a little more fun-loving. And that book is Lolita, by the way.

I was also inspired by the cool painted plaster of the building. It’s somewhere between all those Roman frescoes I used to have to care about and the crumbling of a 60′s-style building, and the texture of the walls of every classroom I had in K-12. That’s why I used it for the background of the site. And you can see more architecture (and me) here:

Not that this a metaphor for escaping academia...

...but if it were, the satisfied look would be dead on.