Shutter Bug

I love taking pictures but being in them is a different story. I think shutter is actually quite a good discription of how I feel when being photographed. The term fits me a lot better than it does as a description for something the camera is doing.

Well it finally happened… our family got photographed for a magazine article on success stories for losing weight and living healthy. The thing is I don’t know if the pictures will be a success. I can always hope that after 45 minutes of an active shoot there will be at least one print-worthy shot.

Why the pessimism? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I scheduled way to much to do yesterday. Everything I did was rushed and some of it was out of the ordinary too.

When we filled out the questionnaire on family activities that we liked to do I tried to think of the things that Evo-man especially enjoyed doing. We didn’t suggest swimming because there’s no way on earth that I would allow a picture of me in a swimsuit issue, so we ended up saying that we liked to bike, run, and roller skate/blade as a family. I guess they have too many pictures of people running and biking so they replied that they thought the roller skating pictures would be perfect, and maybe some Frisbee stuff too.

Drat! I was hoping they wouldn’t pick that one. See I only mentioned it because it’s something the boys and Lea are good at. You put me in skates and they might as well make the song, ‘Another one bites the dust’, my theme. So the half of the family that aren’t klutzes already had their own skates. The ones of us that are gracefully challenged don’t. So I scrounged up a couple of extra pairs, from friends, so we all could participate.

The weatherman promised 50 degree’s and partly cloudy. Well he lied! It had to have been in the low 40’s or even 30’s with some continuous frigid Alaskan monster wind playing havoc with my hastily groomed hair. So much for the time I spent trying to make it look cute. I did make the super-human effort to wear a little make-up. Of course I had to hide the 5 new zits that had decided to make their appearance on a shoot day of all days. Adult acne stinks! Doesn’t it always work out that way?

Here’s the kicker – you know all about our fashion disasters. Well it was my turn- again. I had everyone’s clothes ready to go but mine. I was all prepared to wear these cute little Capri black pants with a darling mint and white stripe down the sides with a brand new mint colored tee on top. I even washed the pants last night so they would be ready to go, and set them aside so I wouldn’t forget them. I knew that if I had to wear my lavender jacket, because of the cold, it would still look o.k.

And the first mental lapse occurred at just the wrong time. Silly me forgot where I set aside my pants, and I was running late. So I throw on option two which was another pair of Capri pants in a kacki color with a salmon colored tee. Not too bad to look at but didn’t really go with the lavender jacket. That’s o.k. I thought, ‘I’ll just take the jacket off when we get to the park to meet the photographer.’ Once we got to the shoot location do you think I remembered to take off the jacket? Mental lapse #2 – Nope - I think the freezing wind drove the thought out of my head. So now when they look at the picture proofs they are going to wonder…

‘Who dressed that lady?

‘Is she color blind?’

I can only hope that with eight differently hued bodies in the same picture it won’t stand out as much.

Due to the monster cold wind we only tried a couple minutes of frisbee pictures, before the photographer mentioned that he thought now would be a great time to put on the skates. So I quickly handed out the skates to everyone in the family. Of course I put mine on last. The pair I borrowed for me had to be a couple of sizes small but I wedged my little tootsies in them nonetheless. It’s really hard to smile when you’re trying to constantly suck in your gut and you’re in pain.

Princess, who is scared of everything (including skating), then decided that a look of sheer panic would be the expression glued to her face for the remainder of her time in skates. It didn’t matter that someone always held her hand. So I’m not expecting any picture she posed for to actually represent her cute bubbly self.

And Hope, well she loved it but is still new at skating and was kind of an inchworm, so our progress was super slow. Good thing she is still in diapers too because she needed the extra cushion for her little slips. Hopefully it will look like we are moving in the picture instead of inching forward. I guess the wind was good for adding motion because our hair was flying. Maybe with hair flying everywhere it will give the illusion of moving.

The good thing is everyone, except Princess and the occasionally grimacing me, was having a blast and natural mile-wide grins were everywhere. So cross your fingers and hope they got a couple of pictures that look o.k. Of course I’ll post my favorite when they let us have copies.