The worst photos in the world are passport photos

By Alison
29 October, 2009
Comments Off on The worst photos in the world are passport photos

We’re travelling to sydney this year for christmas, which is brilliant and wonderful and fun, but hideously stressful at the same time. The travelling itself – sitting in weeny seats on a plane by myself with two children – isn’t the most stressful part though. What really cranks me up are the bits that come in the run-up to the travel date. The packing, the insurance, the ensuring all documents are up to date, the children’s entertainment, and just pretty much living through the chaos.

It was very hard to find flights that we could afford at this time of year, since travelling as a family is very expensive. The kids are as close to full price as you can get without paying for the cheese sandwich as well (kids get much better meals, actually – especially for breakfast. Luckily mine will probably be asleep again when that arrives, so I am looking foward to the blueberry pancakes!). I try and make sure that we get as much quality time out there as we can, and travel in the cheapest slots that exist and also include seats with cushions, and exclude livestock. For this reason, our flights leave Heathrow on Sunday the 6th. That is a mere 11 hours after I finish playing the christmas concert with my orchestra. It’s also two weeks before the school holiday begins.

Normally the night before a journey of this magnitude is filled to the edges like an overloaded peanut butter sandwich with packing, repacking, panicking, and then forgetting at least one major item. My night before however, needs to be done at least a week prior to flying. On the day of the concert I need to be totally packed. If we have to wear disposable underwear because I packed it all, so be it.

With 6 weeks to go, I’ve tried to make sure I’ve thought of all the things that could go wrong. One of the things that I made sure I checked was the expiry date of the passports. That was lucky, because mine expires the week before we fly. Oh sugar. The renewal time is 10 days from when they receive your form in the mail. It’s a good thing the postal service is on strike, isn’t it. Normally you would mail the documents, photos and your old passport to the Australian Consulate in London. But there is no way I was trusting my most important document to the Royal Mail, so I had to go and drop it in in person. I also had to get a new passport photo.

The regulations for photographs have changed a lot since my last passport photo. Here is my last one (see left) – actually it’s really good, considering that it’s a passport photo! And then there is the one before my current one (see right) – I was doing the “look off-to-the-side-and-grin-as-if-someone-just-made-you-laugh-at-the-last-minute-in-the-photo-booth-look”. It wasn’t true. I can’t work out why my head is so small! By the way, I don’t have a beard, it’s just the cancelled stamp. Honest. Facial hair wasn’t a problem back then.

But now you are not allowed to smile, and your head needs to be fill the area, and be exactly 32mm from head to chin with a few millimetres leeway. The easiest thing to do is to take a good normal photo (front on, not smiling, etc), then upload it to passpic and have them send you back a perfectly suitable version. Unfortunately, they use the Royal Mail.

Now, I hate how my face looks when I am not smiling. I look like the churchill insurance dog. All I can see in the photo is a pair of jowels that reach my shoulders, hanging down like fleshy wrinkled slabs. So I didn’t want to go down to snappy snaps and put myself at their disposal. I could just see myself getting thrown out of the shop after rejecting 27 digital snaps on the trot.

So I decided to create my own passport photo. I dug the old blackout blind from the babies room out of the loft, and hung it in the conservatory. Then I set up a stool, and the camera on the tripod and made myself a little studio. With my remote in hand, I took a series of photos with various tilts of my chin, and with range of mouth styles, from totally relaxed – which looks like I’ve just had a stroke – to an almost (But not quite) smile. Then I loaded them up and had a look.

I had to reject the first lot, as the flash was leaving blue spots in the corners of my eyes, so I tried again without the flash. These were not good either, the lack of flash made the shadows fall into the jowelly bits.

The third attempt was more successful, and I managed to edit the shadow from behind my head too. I doubled it up and saved it as a jpg to take down to snappy snaps. It cost me all of 50p to have printed out (if they’d taken the photo it would have been £6.99). So all in all, it was a successful venture. Or – it will be if the passport services department doesn’t reject it!

So, having sorted the passport out, I now need to do some packing. There’s a problem with that… all our suitcases have given up the ghost. They were my parent’s old suitcases brought from Australia when I first travelled 13 years ago. So they’ve started to disintegrate, and as they only have handles, they are more tricky to cart about. Last time I travelled alone with the girls, I ended up having to carry all three by myself as there were no trolleys in the arrivals hall.

On that day, I was the kind of person that con-men prey on. As I struggled towards customs and the exit door at midnight with these three suitcases and two tired and upset children trying to pull 3 carryon bags – a friendly man offered to help me carry the bags. I took one look at this guy with no baggage at all, and knew he was planning on carrying them through the door, then just walking off with them while I greeted my husband. So I smiled, and said “that would be lovely thanks!”. And he picked up two bags.

We made our way down the tunnel and there was Mr Boxer Shorts waiting with his arms wide. The girls dropped their bags and leapt (tiredly!) into them. I put down my bag, took several fast catchup steps, placed my hand on his arm as he continued walking away from me, and said “just here will be fine, thanks!”. I gave him my brightest smile, and took both bags out of his bag. He looked disconcerted, and wandered off in no particular direction. He didn’t go outside the building though. If he HAD managed to steal our bags, he may have found that the 5 year old shorts and summer dresses didn’t quite fit him.

So with that experience in mind, I need new bags that can be piled on top of each other and pulled along on wheels. Plus I want them to be quite unique, so that any opportunistic thieves will pass them over for more bland luggage to appropriate. I’ve found something I like, but it might not be to Mr Boxer Shorts’ taste. It’s a set of bright pink floral luggage. Because we are very pink in this family it will suit us to the ground. But Mr BS is travelling a week or two later than we are, alone. Do I dare make him carry a bright pink bag too?