Truth In Blogging

I have to confess that I have no idea how photographers manage to orchestrate most of the shots of models you see on the internet and in print. Really, I don’t know how they possibly do it, even with the best of technology and things like rampant airbrushing at their disposal.

Last Saturday, I wrote a post about a Fresh Produce dress I loved, and included a picture of myself in the dress, wanting to show how the dress looked on a “real” woman. I roped LCB into bringing the camera to the beach to take some pictures of me in the dress, figuring the backdrop of the ocean would work well with the beach-casual look of the dress. On the evening of the photo shoot (which admittedly involved a professional staff of zero, i.e., LCB and myself) for the Impromptu dress, we went to the beach about an hour before sunset, and naturally, it suddenly became cloudy and increasingly windy almost literally as our feet hit the sand. Normally, it would have been advisable, in that moment, to have turned around and tried again another day. However, because I knew there was a very good chance that this would be the only time in the next few days where LCB would be available to take the pictures, I decided to just work with what I had. The alternative would be to return at a later date and accost complete strangers on the beach about taking my picture, which would be about as likely to happen as me suddenly being drafted into the NFL as a defensive lineman.

Just saying.

Consequently, most of the pictures ended up looking something like this,

where I was caught attempting to keep the hair out of my face and to wipe away the tears that were streaming down my cheeks (it’s a wind/allergy thing) so LCB could get a decent picture.

Hey, if nothing else, I’ve got natural covered, right?

There were also a few shots, quite lovely really, except not, that made me look as if I was trying to replicate the famous Marilyn Monroe pose. To give you some perspective on the whole thing, let’s just say that if Marilyn’s shots had turned out like mine, they would have never made their way to the public eye. Likewise, my shots will never make their way to the public eye, as they have already been deleted for the good of the human race.

Since the small people are all still in the single-digit age group and thus have little say about where they are and are not going to go on a given day, they accompanied us. Off to the side then, while I was trying to walk in circles around the beach, hoping to catch the wind at a semi-flattering angle, the small people were busy collecting and piling debris from the beach into larger piles. They created their own mountains of debris, and then played king of the mountain.

In the end, the children that came to the beach half-heartedly to “help out Mom” were the ones that virtually forgot the existence of their parental units, so busy where they building piles and yelling into the wind. Our repeated calls to leave were only heeded when LCB began throwing out threats of frightening concepts like a chocolate-less world for children who didn’t heed their parental units’ decree.

So, there you have it. There was no team of photographers armed with assistants and refreshments. The weather was far from perfect. The small people ran around like the wild children they are, completely unsupervised by nannies or tutors. And there were never any comments made like, “Wow. There are so many good pictures here that it will be hard to know which one to use.” Not by a long shot.

And that’s truth in blogging for you.

But, the photo shoot will go down in the annals of Island Family history.

Minus a few pictures, anyway.