Stop ruining your birthday with old hat
No cap
See this pic of me. Pretty cool, huh? Birthdays are two things: a calendar reminder of our age; and a shot for immortality. We take that shot of course with a camera. But the colorful images of birthday balloons and candles and clowns serve as dark reminders of a carnivalesque atmosphere where every chance-met shot we take is rigged to fail.
So here, to avoid the rollercoaster ride in effect, I dove right into preproduction. I tweaked the artificial light, struck a haughty pose, and played around with the “Happy Birthday” tone of my photo.
Absent those steps, the photo likelier still reflects an image of me looking myself in a funhouse mirror. A parade of oddities and horribles does not a happy birthday make. You might think that a birthday scene sometimes compares not entirely hyperbolically <so funny it was a circus> but not literally. But you only think so, since any social media user worth their salt who happened into this bit of circus ground would avoid sharing that altogether, and likely without a second-thought given to whether they snagged an Instagrammable moment for their next carousel.
My birthday is March 9th. To mark the occasion this year, I attended a murder mystery dinner, where I was interrogated by plainclothes police acting a part. I confessed. I am a fashion photographer. It is all true. I capture people dressed to kill for a living yet somehow failed to capture the mystery murderer on camera, so I may as well spill the beans here about how I crafted the perfect birthday frame-up. I don’t know if engaging in finger-pointing will help us solve the problem but I will go with photo evidence and hand it over to the shy girls out here looking to slay (as distinguishable from shy guys in Super Mario Bros 2), along with a proven method for catching social butterflies and shutterbugs on social media, likewise, out here to make a killing.
All that glitters is not gold and the proof is in the pudding, they say. Indeed this sparkling edition of Photogenic shines a night-light on photography and fires up more than a candlestick’s worth of bright ideas to illuminate and inspire your next birthday shoot—that is, more than a shot in the dark.
And don't blow out the candle on this edition just yet, Reader. Hang in for the highlights of life update on the down-low.