Thursday, December 16, 2010

...because you act more interesting. (Except for Tommy)

It's a typical gathering of you and a friend or so. Nothing out of the ordinary, but then a friend pulls out a camera and wants to take a picture. Suddenly the event has been elevated to a documented status. Do you choose to be documented as you normally were (i.e. group photo of smiling people) or do you act more interesting? The former is only interesting to look at for the people involved, the other is more memorable to you and anyone else who sees it. Take the following:
A nice photo of my sister and I, and there's nothing wrong with this type of photo. It serves a specific purpose, but I forgot about this picture in comparison to this one:
I think it can be agreed that we are both more interesting in this picture. Granted one person isn't posing, but had the camera not been there, this would have gone on as a quiet drive. Now, because the camera was there I chose to act more interesting.
You can think of those people who make faces for cameras. Not only do they make the faces, but they will hold those faces until a given time. Think about these motions and how unnatural they are for most of us. For that moment though, we were more interesting than usual. Those are the moments we tend to like ourselves better.