Say Cheese!

Have you ever looked at old family photos and had a really good laugh at the expense of your parents and their horrible hair cuts? Or maybe your Aunt Bea's (yes I really had an Aunt Bea) dress made entirely of doilies.

Or maybe you have a hidden gem like this one! I found this at Awkward Family Photos dot com which is full of things to giggle and snort at. They even have a book now, available at Amazon and a few other retailers. Pretty epic stuff.

Do you think they used a full can of AuqaNet to get their hair up that high? Maybe the family that teases together stays together? Based on it's parent's hair I can't even tell if that's a boy or girl! I'm leaning towards girl because there is more bang, but I can't be sure.

My mom had some pretty whacky things done to my hair in school but it never made me look like a Guns N' Roses groupie. The Poodle Perm of fifth grade was pretty bad though....

The real reason for this post though, is not to disparage those poor souls from the 80's who didn't know any better. The real reason is to share my own family photos!

Remember when I mentioned a few posts back that Scott and I had decided to have some photos taken? We (well maybe it was just me) were really excited about fun photos on a beach and looking all tan and youthful and basically just having a good time.

We were looking pretty adorable that morning if I do say so myself. I had a really cute green dress on. Scott was looking relaxed and beachy in khaki shorts and a white button down shirt. I even had good hair despite the crazy humidity. Bonus! We showed up at the beach and waited. Photographer was about 20 minutes late. Not a huge deal. We're on vacation and we're in Mexico. I'm not going to let it bother me.

Juan shows up, very apologetic, he'd had car trouble. No big deal, it's beautiful and we're ready. We start taking some photos, hand in hand, walking along the beach. This is perfect! Then he has us back up a little, to get more water. Okay, we're on a beach, that makes sense. Then I get hit with a wave that soaks half my dress...hmmm we've only been at this for 10-15 minutes and my dress is already drenched. Oh well, it's warm. It should dry some and this will be fine. Then he asks me to walk over some rocks. Great! These will be really cool shots! Then he asks me to wade into a pool of water about two to three feet deep. I'm only 5'3" tall. That's almost half of me. Hmmmm.

Apparently he thought this was a "Trash The Dress" session like my Sister in Law had scheduled to do later in the day. You see she had this awesome wedding dress to do that in as she'd been married the day before.

I think it's a fairly new trend in wedding photos, but it's a pretty awesome one. Brides roll around in sand and basically trash their dresses and get these amazing shots.

I wasn't in a wedding dress though. I was in a short little sun dress. So when a wave would hit me, it would flip my dress all the way up to my head. I think I put on a little lingerie show for the photographer.

Really, I think it comes down to a misunderstanding and my failure to verify exactly what I had in mind. I tried to go with the flow once it had started because what else can you do? Unfortunately it just didn't work for us. When it was all said and done I had sand so far into my ear that I had to use ear cleaning solution to get it out, Scott and were both exhausted and we felt a little beat up.

Still, even though I was a little apprehensive I tried to imagine what great shots we'd get out of it so I was okay with the whole ordeal.

Then I got the link to the photos.

For an hour of photo taking, for nearly $300 we got 20 retouched shots. I like one of them. I don't hate one other one. The 18 other photos are worthy of the website mentioned above. They will never see the light of day.

There are so many things wrong with some of them I can't list them all. Not everything was the photographers fault either. Like I look REALLY stiff in some of them. It's obvious I wasn't comfortable with what was going on. But my biggest pet peeve is that because we had to look directly into the sun, you never get to see Scott's eyes. Not once do his pretty blues show up. The sun was so bright, and we never changed directions so it was impossible for him to open his eyes. There are other things wrong too, but no point in dwelling. I guess we'll chalk this up to a learning experience, and maybe a sign that we shouldn't be doing family photos... Sometimes I need to pay more attention to the universe I guess. Maybe we'll try again someday. Dammit I wanted cute pictures for our house that aren't ten years old!

Here are the two I'm willing to share, and I cropped the first one. I'm hunched over in it, so unless I crop it it looks like my boobs are hanging down to my knees and my dress is all poofed out weird. Thank goodness for cropping tools! The second one is nice but my dress is wet and I think that looks a little weird. Plus I'm a little stiff. At least my tan and all that running made my legs look nice! Bright side right????