Photographer By Accident – Nobody’s Too Young To Be Ugly

A few days ago a couple of co-workers and I pulled up to an elementary school ready to tackle the day. I had been photographing high school kids for a couple weeks and was sort of looking forward to the challenge of younger kids. Well, the school dropped a bomb on us. Not literally of course. That would be bad for business. No, they dropped something worse than a bomb. They dropped three-year-olds on us. They started a pre-school this year, and with no warning we had to photograph them. And they were crying. Early mornings and crying kids do not belong together. Needless to say, it put a damper on the day.

I was a little stressed trying to learn how to get good expressions from tiny kids and the crying just didn’t help. Remember, it was them crying not me. As the classes got older the day went much more smoothly. Somewhere around grade 1 or 2 kids become, well, I’ll just say it. Human. They finally become human. They respond, sit still, and smile!

When I got to the grade 5 class they were starting to give a little attitude. All good for the most part. Right at the end of the class there was this little girl. She looked really cool. Cool shoes, cool hair. She’ll end up being an artist or something. She was pretty talkative and informed me that the picture wasn’t going to be any good because she was ugly. She’s in grade 5, how does she know what ugly is?

She sat on the block and fell almost perfectly into the pose. I got her to smile and the picture looked great. I don’t know what convinced this kid that she was ugly, but I really felt for her. I was so happy with the portrait that I decided to show it to her. I hardly ever do that because there just isn’t time for everybody to look at their picture. When she saw it, she said “that’s the best picture of me I’ve ever had.” I was on cloud 9 for like a week.

Not a bad day.

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