Picture Yourself as Prom Royalty
A crowning achievement for your social media
Hey, I’m Bonnie and welcome to a 🔑 free edition 🔑 of my TGIF newsletter. Each week I share insight into the art of being photogenic, Including how to pose, what to wear—fashionable style, makeup—and a lot of whatnot that may benefit your photo. Why, because you can do all that with a phone camera.
According to USA Today, the tradition of school proms is rooted in the formal debutante balls of Victorian society.
After reading the announcement, he resolved to ask her to the junior prom at the first opportunity.
Expectation: a feeling of class;
Reality: a History class.
Standard expectations are old companions of embarrassing realities. These embarrassments are well known as a sleazy pleasure at best—like watching a schoolkid get a wedgie, or reading an entry in the Burn Book <she rejected him flat out, BTW>. As with social faux pas, we pretend not to notice them. And perhaps they should be ignored by responsible people (the bully and the mean girl at least).
Excessive reflection on these expectations might tend to suggest schooltime does not or cannot mean real time after all. The campus queen reigned over the weekend festivities, never so much as deigning a mention of extraterritorial sovereignty—not just because it is unsettling and disappointing to consider all 40 people between you and the British crown, but because to put in a year’s schooltime for a sort of correspondence course in kingcraft when the need therefor no longer exists would seem demented. Do you actually think you left popularity contests behind in high school? Please, get real.
So worrying overmuch about realities and then inferring since it is logically impossible to picture expectations anyway might lead us into paradoxes of Zeno, realizing that a swift runner cannot overtake a slow tortoise given a head start of 15 paces because the distance between them can be furthermore subdivided. We might as well stay in bed.
Well, speak of the devil! We were just talking about me. I never attended my prom. Just do as I say, not as I do. OK.
Something is obviously wrong with the logic anyhow because its conclusion is disproven by experience. The school prom couldn’t care less about student expectations and realities leapfrogging each other. Who cares? Nike cares. The goddess of victory gave humanity her Air Jordan sneakers. “Just do it” understood that action beats reaction. Easier to stop a problem than to correct it. Kids like us embraced those sneaks to the exclusion of any other logos at foot conceiving of how we might’ve just thunk it. As it were, the schoolteacher admonished us not to put Descartes before the horse. “‘I think therefore I am,’ he said,” she said.
Sensing the qualifications and doubts that distinguish divine proofs from the hearsays of medievalists, I called up the venue (where it answered imaginatively, “Gestalt School Catering”).
I had visited with a caterer on the telephone but I didn’t know the place. The interior was papered in early Post-it note. While most visitors omit to walk round the walls in their hurry and some slowgoing anyways could not see the writing on the wall, it points in the same direction. No matter how it is tilted, the note has done little to paper over the cracks. It was assumed around school corridors that prom pictures would be taken in a kind of penny arcade photo booth that went out with wooden-floored Woolworths. According to publicity, an alcove will feature photos, mementos, and memorabilia of famed promenading couples through history and fiction.
It boggles the mind to imagine how they are going to determine who will enter the Prom Hall of Fame and for what reasons, but here are a few nominations.
Best Scene-Lighting Direction
Daylight coming in the side or front window of a car or limo will produce a cool hue and color tone with pleasing harmony, perfect for snagging an Instagrammable moment before going about your business with no overhead.
There’s no business like show business, they say, except for overhead (as rent, taxes, insurance, lighting, heating, accounting and other office expenses, and depreciation). Suffice it to say that there are more than enough dark endeavors to turn that deep worry line already etching its way between our brows into a veritable chasm. No overhead lighting of our going concern reflected none of that.
Suppose you were looking up at the stars overhead through the sunroof of a limousine when all of a sudden you’re struck as if by a moonbeam with the bright idea dawning on you to take a selfie. You need help. I mean, you have no daylight available. And the starshine on streetlamps giving humorous sidelights on misadventure does not help there, where photography had to take a back seat in your selfie through the paneled doorway flanked by fluted columns of windowlight.
When night is about you, employ a bright helpmate (here or there, in the darkling valleys of Transylvania, where tales of vampires have long existed). It brightens the tenebrific scene. I prefer LED. Tho any small night-light attached to your phone will work. May it be a light to you, reflecting the difference between photography that develops into the scenes pictured by our imaginations and a Polaroid that transmits your headshot beyond the pale of merely epic failure to the lowest pitch of abject fortune.
Assuming you prefer to see yourself out of the darkness sealed off in the umbra beyond the flame tips, information related to that on a display can be accessed directly from the source in this hypertext.
More analysis will be written … later, but here are some highlights:
(1): Daylight—, the light of day as opposed to the darkness of night. That is, the diffused and reflected daylight of the sun and the sky as distinguished the sunlight or that of the moon and from artificial light.
(2): Night-light—, a light kept burning at night. So here night-light threw some daylight on the problem to provide a light up (as to illuminate a classroom with knowledge or understanding of something that has been obscured).
(3): Candlelight—, a light of candles; any soft artificial light; or less commonly twilight, dusk. The subject can be insensible neither to the magnitude nor delicacy of the question. At the time for lighting up the scene, sixteen x candlelight walloped the daylights out of him, eh?
Best Posturer
My husband whose picture was not nominated here appears on the cover of this newsletter. In the studied Napoleonic attitude he assumed from the innominate scene of his waterloo, Michael postured in a hand tuck that saw men finally gain the upper hand in the posing battle.
The imperial gesture of a handsome model denominated a formal posture in the imposing order of the prom king who lords over the dance floor (and frankly rules).
Anything to say for the dancing queen? It was a bold move, to crown yourself sovereign of an entire school, but you did and your record proved that we believed you.
Each of the below posturers divide the nomination in ladylike handmade/maid gestures sent out on approval by yours truly to group with all your social peerage on digital media and striking homologies in the analog world. Vote for electing yourself prom queen to impose order, model it, along the lines of the stations at the polling place to follow.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, so ladylike of fairly formal mien gently touching your fingertips. How fancy. Bonus: you have something to do with your hands. Also, the handmade triangle with a formal balance in design, often (as above) having a symmetrical arrangement of elements, created a formal composition. Now that’s pretty nifty. You were asked to the formal at the end of the year. You answered by a formal gesture of your hand. Everything had to be in shipshape before you could go. This all is so, now a mere formality, relating to you having the appearance of a prescribed form suitable for wearing to the school prom requiring elegant dress and manners.
Considering the observable similarities and differences relating to the outward form of compositional factors in art and emphasizing these over other factors (as subject matter or content), still in constraint, the feminine touch remains bound in formal or in real chains.
Indeed, the above posture would conform perfectly to the normalities of custom on almost any other occasion. Except for looking away here did not jibe with the customary engaging manners of a prom subject.
Without formal distinction as to posture, gesture, or composition, the informal distinction of subject matter was from when the content merged with the composition to reflect an entirely different POV. An altogether less engaging look, formal and formidable in a manner showing vestiges of Puritan schoolmarms who once kept the tang of the city streets out of our language and in their rigid armor of propriety, asked the censor to look that no man lived idly.
But perhaps we should focus on relating the informal distinction in the matter of formal eduction to a regional custom and content compare, for example: the Ivy League look in the unofficial mascot of Dartmouth College.
Far from neglecting social discourse as a central component of the prom, as tends to happen in the course of a social gathering for dancing, Evans’ approach might seem to give that component lavish attention. And in a sense it does: the handwringing stance of a nervous schoolgirl with the recurring flash of mischief in its demure and marvelously dainty humor, instead of demure anemic virgins, had a knack of adopting an ingenue air. Even so, the posture dressed like linen, nonchalant and swank and cut with demure and deceitful simplicity, not to say this story is exemplary of prom queen style. The handmade triangle manually dropped into maid-in-waiting form seems to have lost its ladylike air. And the red-faced insecurity in the seeming of a rather modest moue does not exactly flush out a colorable claim to the contrary.
More analysis will be written … now. The “Best Posturer” nomination was built around a small team that has been tasked with rearticulating the school prom mission and identity statement:
(1): Bonnie—, a person having a pleasing appearance: attractive especially as suggesting health charm, sweetness, and liveliness: fine—a generalized term of approbation sometimes used ironically <well, my bonnie lass, they found you out>.
(2): Censor—, a hypothetical psychic agency that represents unacceptable notions before they reach consciousness, lacking official sanction but ostensibly having authority to guide and supervise students in school.
(3): Rochelle “Elle” Evans—, the protagonist of The Kissing Booth coming-of-age trilogy whose arbitrary code of ethics might have earned her the title of schoolmarm if she weren’t already her own worst rule breaker.
(4): Keggy—, an anthropomorphic keg of beer: Ivy Leaguer, teen heartthrob, party animal: second only to Champagne Charlie at Harvard, a pet alligator of Will Hearst named because that was what the alligator liked to drink.
Best Picture Soundtrack
Rhythm and harmony are principles of the visual arts which together with elements of line and movement in graphic design composed a lyric and personal response to life.
I think that the solution to this puzzle depends in part on a distinction between ideal and nonideal virtues. For the lyric poser, as for the music composer, virtue depends upon the intensity with which the personal vision is rendered.
The classic school prom portrait rendered a rhapsodic composition whose lyric is fed on the most outspoken type of romantic fervor. The first movement is loose and unrestrained in manner or style of triangle. At the same time the diminishing motion rendered personal height flat, its low range added an extravagantly emotional note of cinematic cheese on top. It was too bad the prom had chose such a meatball to be the poster child for students rendering either a terrible bliss of self-love, a rhapsodic egotism, or a maternity pic. In any case, from an outsider’s eye view, nonideal rendering of the school prom image.
The second movement is short and sweet in a tight manner or style of triangle. The revision of the lyric on a rectilinear motion succeeded to fine-tune the format, rendering a sharp image right on the cutting edge.
Just as excitement in the auditorium slowly built up and reached its crescendo when the star walked on stage, the amped-up couple reached a natural height intact—opposed to rendered short in fact (as when the star bombed on stage, saw a rotten tomato, ducked her head to everyone on the platform, and ran down the steps). Anyway they would not forget a fact that cuts the ground from under their appearances. It’d happened to other prom goers too, each and every one tall or small, however they cut the rug, lost some stature versing the camera in virtue of working off something that could not work at anything anymore.
Bonus: Rhythm and harmony composed in unity (she made a triangle above the waistline he accentuated below with a triangle); also vibe angled a way of keeping the total kinetic energy of the prom unchanged.
Pulling Brenda in close was a tad aggressive. But fist bumps are too bro-ey and elbow bumps are just awkward. Imagine knocking elbows with your future boss at a high-stakes job interview. Dylan comes across more as the clueless guy who can't be bothered to notice what the women are forced to endure. And look at Brenda. The portrait catches her likeness perfectly, right down to the way she emotes an uncomfortable expression (like under duress). Hold on. She might not be acting. And he might not be acting a teensy bit aggressive. Coupled together, their prom looks like he has stolen her salad, but she's too well-mannered to make a scene or afraid dittos, going along à deux with the sketchiest back story in a whole sequence of tortious acts (as of assault, battery, possible kidnapping, blackmail). The prom is one night a year. Let’s not make it twenty-to-life. Y’know, Dill, there's a rod in pickle for bad boys like you.
Best Selfie
A selfie is not a formal sitting for portraiture. But neither is the prom. So go right ahead and snag your selfie in a two-shot, using the right technique, of course.
The right technique used for a mirror reflection selfie or self-portrait needn’t exclude the camera, as with the famous multiple reflections of photographer Roy DeCarava in his portrait. It does, however, require a basic understanding of shift.
If you were to turn the camera on its side and raise or lower the bottom, the rise and fall effect produced would in effect be the same as back shift. Since shift is simply a sideways version of rise and fall, you get the same exact or very similar result. Back shift to the left moves the subject to the left. Back shift to the right moves the subject to the right. Left or right shifts have just the opposite results. The spatial relationships change with front (or top) shift but not with back shift because the lens views objects from a different point. Front shift of the lens forward has the same effect on the POV as moving the entire camera to the left or right. Back shift simply moves the entire image within the frame. The examples below illustrate the shift in POV. We did not move.
All right, I give the triangle a wide berth for a wide-angle photographic shot. With all the scene set in boldface or all reflections wide producing a relatively heavy impression of a space for an imaginative reboot, you might’ve missed it. Look closely at the way Michael is holding the phone camera compared with the next image. It’s sort of humorous to see the spatial relationships from a different POV in the mirror image of a mirror image of the mirror in the mirror on a black mirror.
Michael is a good man in a tight situation. Here is proof. He kept a tight hand on the affair reflecting in a mirror image and deftly moved the camera forward and to the left, moving us sideways in a shift to right within the frame of the mirror. And while Michael also seemingly lost an inch or two of height due to the front shift—lookee at that triangle of mine, marked by shapely graceful form. That’s tight!
Ever notice that the tiny version of pretty much anything is super adorbs, from poodles to party favors? Well, the same goes for acuteness of triangles, that’s a cuter figure.
Best Timed Group Performance
The sublime beauty of that night may not reflect the sublime stench in a city of evil smells but still prove a sublime style difficult to maintain. So here is what to do. Take the sublimest photos of your formal engagement, then take time to have fun.
OK group, perform.
They could go on dancing until they couldn’t dance anymore. But you have a prom to attend. So go do that. And I will see you next week.
If you should have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. Leave a comment on the post. Also, feel free to spread positivity, glowing praise, and good vibes all around, okeydoke, give it a like 👍 or sign off on a write-up.
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