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Camera Adds Good Looks

A while back, I was hunting for something on a website. I don't even really remember what it was, but I was trying to find some information and I thought that the organization's website might be a good way to find that info. I'm sure you've participated in a similar exercise at least once in your life. Maybe you needed to find a return policy for a company, you had to find a person to call for some reason or another, or you just wanted to find the organization's hours. Either way, this should be a familiar set up for many of you.

The part that came next, however, is likely new, and hopefully amusing, to you. You see, this particular website had headshots for many of its leaders. I tend to like this when it's a publicly-facing site, as it puts a face to a name. Sure, I might know the name John Doe, but it feels a little personal if I see John Doe's face. It obviously has its downsides (this is the Internet we're talking about, after all), but I can see the value of the practice. So, I noted that John Doe had a very professional looking head shot, and they'd obviously spent some time on this particular feature of the site.

I wasn't looking for John Doe on this particular Internet expedition, though, so I kept hunting. In doing so, I came across some video testimonials from some of the organization's members. Since I was investigating, I scrolled through the list in order to see if any of the videos covered the information I was looking for. I didn't see anything that obviously discussed the subject of my inquiry, but I did scan through the titles and names of the members who were speaking in the videos.

In doing so, I came across John Doe's video. I actually did a double take, because I didn't recognize him at first. I had just seen his picture, so it wasn't like I'd forgotten what his face looked like. However, the person on this video only had a passing resemblance to the head shot that I'd seen on the previous page. He had a very different hair cut, his waistline looked noticeably different, and the shirt he had on was in a very, very different style than the one in his photo. It almost looked like I was watching a video of John Doe's cousin instead of John Doe.

In an effort to validate my opinion, I called the Mild Wife over to see if I was, as it is occasionally described in the Mild Home, trippin'. I showed her the photo and the video, and asked her what she thought. She laughed, and immediately exclaimed, "that's not John, that's Joe!" Yup, she decided that the two did not look alike, and that we were in fact looking at two different people. I punctuated my sense of vindication with a hearty laugh.

In the end, though, I've decided that there are two ways to look at this: either the video was unkind to John, or the photo was extremely flattering. I choose the latter, in part because now I have a goal in life: find that camera/photographer. You know that saying about how the camera adds ten pounds (incidentally, here's a particularly interesting article about it)?Apparently there are some cameras that add good looks to your photos.

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