AUTHOR PHOTO 101 | 5 Reasons I’m Not a Model (Besides the Obvious)

Last month, I rallied myself and three dear friends for an author photo shoot. For weeks, I’d been dreading it yet looking forward to ticking the task off my to-do list. I engaged the girly-girl talents of K and C to do my hair and makeup.

One peek at myself with makeup on, and I couldn’t believe it. I looked damned good. I couldn’t help but lament my cluelessness all these years and vowed to start wearing a little eyeliner and mascara at the very least. Lesson learned: primer coats don’t only apply to house painting.

J, the photographer, sported a camera with a portrait lens about two feet long. Poor guy had to contend with 90-plus degree heat (the hottest weekend this year as luck would have it) and me jabbering and fooling around. We were lucky to get a good image before my makeup started melting.

By the end of the day, I discovered that even if I were 16 and a raging ectomorph, I could never be a model because:

1. I don’t take direction well. I don’t know how many times J told me to hold still and stop talking. The photo session brought out my inner six year old.

2. I goof off too much. Come to find out that I haven’t outgrown my tendency to ham it up. This, too, is a leftover from my girlhood. But hamming it up does not a good model make.

3. I don’t get makeup. After the primer coat, K put about five other layers of “naturalistic” makeup on me. She called her brush strokes “shading,” “contouring,” and good old “masking,” which was a nice way of saying hiding the purple shadows beneath my eyes. Don’t ask me what she did with eyeshadow. All I know it that my image in the mirror showed a woman with gynormous, popping-out-of-my-head blue eyes. Even the photographer said, “Whoa.”

4. I don’t slouch becomingly. When a model slouches, she may look like a contorted preying mantis, but she’s a bloody gorgeous, avant garde preying mantis. I just look like I’ve got scoliosis and no neck.

5. I refuse to take off my glasses. I like my glasses, but high fashion they are not.

Drum roll, please…Here’s the winning photo that will appear on my cover jacket!