Me searching for a way to not look like a creeper when I’m on camera. I failed.

Whenever possible I try to generate original images for this site. Sometimes that means I have to be a model. I am not a good model.

For my last post I asked my wife to take some photos of me wearing the sustainable clothing I was writing about. Supportive as she is, we did a photo shoot. You’d think it’d be simple. But when your model is self-conscious and has a neutral expression that reads “I want to kill everyone” it quickly complicates.

We tried all sorts of poses and I was terrible at all of them. Here are a few of the rejects we went through to get the one I actually used:

  • I was insistent on showing off my wooden watch. Which made posing 100x more difficult.
  • After what felt like a thousand poses of me leaning back and looking terrible, my wife asked me to lean forward. Turned out better.
  • Athena was a less cooperative model than I was. Here she was making sure I got a good view of her butt.

We realized that part of the problem wasn’t me (although it was, like, 90% a me problem) but the camera. My wife just wasn’t liking the images she was getting from her camera, so we switched to mine and I did a quick test shot with her as the model.

And, just to make me look foolish, she was great the first shot.

In conclusion, if anyone ever tells you they’d like to be a model because it’s easy kindly let them know it is not. Thank you.