This is for all the camwhores out there.  Pardon my french, but the most common camera pose nowadays sucks.  Yes, the most common camera shot is with a camera held at arm’s length and pointing at oneself.  I say it sucks because there is no possibility of composing and expanding the picture.

No offense meant to anyone who’s done that before.  I know I have.  On my wedding day, even.  And that was with a film camera.  But really, there’s only that very close shot and if you’re lucky, you occupy the whole picture.  If you’re unlucky, it might show an ear.  But considering that the digital camera might have a wide-focus lens, the ear only shot is a very slim possibility.

I don’t mean to say that I don’t like the shot.  I actually hate it.  First off, because in all probability, the lens is wide angle, the resulting picture would be distorted.  The face would be a bit fatter, and the nose wider.  As an aside, this is also what happens when you have an ID picture shot at an arcade booth.  I will not go into the psychological study of people who have no better things to do than take pictures of themselves.  To them I say, knock yourself out.

I would much rather use a tripod.  Or at least a camera’s timer.  If there’s no tripod available, you can always set the camera down somewhere and hope it doesn’t fall and take a shot at the sky.  Now if I only had a camera remote control, I would not have ran uphill those several times I went to some hill top spots.

Tripods are cheap.  At least these are much cheaper than the camera.  Come to think of it, I have two cameras of my own, and two tripods.  One camera and tripod set was bought twenty years ago.  I don’t use the camera as often as before, but the old tripod still gets a lot of use.  And I expect to be using it for a much longer time than my film-based camera.

And yes, I bought the tripod so I won’t have to take a picture of myself at arm’s length.

There is however, one exception to the camwhore-camera-held-at-arm’s-length-sucks picture. If a celebrity on the red-carpet was bantering with fans and shot the photo at arm’s length to show him and the fans, then that is way cool!