“I find it’s often hard to take a good picture of someone wearing a HELLO stick-on label.”
Jim Roberts of Noded raised this excellent point in his comment on my blogpost yesterday. Have you ever wondered:
- why photos of people at conferences look so bad?
- why your passport photo looks like Uncle Bill on a bender?
- why some photographers take gorgeous pictures, but most take photos so bad our subjects wish their heads had been cut off?
Answer: there are force-fields in our universe that make (some) people look terrible in (some) photos. These “Photogenicity Inhibiting Force Fields” or PIFFs are my own contribution to physics and metaphysics:
- Why do PIFFs attach to objects like HELLO badges?
- Why do PIFFs pervade the world of “Official” photos?
- How do photographers like Niek get rid of PIFFs?
- Why is everyone in my family but me immune to them?
As soon as my lawyers pin down the trademark, copyright, and patent rights to “PIFF”, I’ll be unveiling this for the New York Times.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Niek Hockx // Jun 16, 2003 at 10:57 pm
Betsy, first of all thank you for the big compliment! You are too kind!
You are touching on a very interesting subject here and I for one am looking forward to your scientific explanation of PIFFs. Photographers deal with them on a daily basis, but to my knowledge nobody ever actually pinned them down theoretically. So this is groundbreaking stuff you’re unveiling here.
IMHO an important reason why PIFFS are so omnipresent is the fact that they are artificially boosted by mankind. Ever since Kodak told humanity “You push the button, we do the rest” there has been a steady growth in PIFFs on this planet and most of the PIFFs we see today are not the original, natural PIFFs anymore, but the artificial manmade kind.
There is a direct link between PIFF polution and commerce, resulting in the widespread believe that one will never take any bad pictures if one buys an automatic camera. The more advanced automatic features the better one thinks. “Everybody is a photographer” nowadays and new waves of digital cameras and assphone cams will only contribute to that believe and consequently result in more and more manmade PIFF polution.
Of course this phenomenon is only part of a much bigger, global environmental catastrophe, brought upon us by the commercial software industry. “You buy our software, we do the rest”. Entire generations today already believe that it’s not nescessary anymore to learn the basics of virtually anything, because software will take care of them for us… ;-)
2 jr // Jun 17, 2003 at 6:09 pm
I’m thinking conference or better yet the PIFF awareness telethon by second quarter of next year.
For some reason I was also thinking it might be fun to take a series of headless self portraits. Great minds same gutter.
3 Betsy Devine // Jun 18, 2003 at 5:48 am
More great ideas from jr of noded! (My blog must think so too, since it double-posted your comment.) But I foresee a problem with the telethon–our cute poster-child-for-PIFF will be turned by those very PIFFs into a rugrat-lookalike.
4 The Children's Liberation Front (actually, Yule) // Jun 18, 2003 at 10:38 pm
I bet you could develop a PIFF-Defense cream, market that, and make out like a bandit. People would buy it. I just have to look at my passport photo and I start rummaging for my burkha! BTW, The photos of you that you posted are beautiful, and the one that Frank Paynter had was obviously taken when you were simultaneously tired — because conferences start way too early in the morning, i.e.. in the morning, instead of in the afternoon — and concentrating very hard. There’s a reason why models tend to look vacant: it allows the PIFF-Defense cream to work. The only other anti-PIFF weapon is happiness, which is what you’re wearing in those pics on this site. ;-)