The Cheap Picture

1. Find a respectable patch of wall.

I stand in the bathroom doorway with my shirt buttoned wrong. The wall behind me is plain. This already makes it better qualified for a portrait than I am.

I am trying to take a picture of myself that somebody might keep. Not a publicity photograph. No writer’s squint suggesting I have just discovered something terrible about civilization. I want to look like a man who was available on a Wednesday.

I prop the phone against a folded towel, set the timer, and get into position. Ten seconds is a long time to prepare a face. I begin with a smile, reconsider the smile, remember my teeth, and arrive at an expression normally associated with a disputed charge on a restaurant bill.

The photograph is sharp. Unfortunately, so am I.

2. Decide which part you are paying for.

Some parents have started making their own school-style pictures with AI. Carlie Bond photographed her three school-age children against a plain backdrop, then asked ChatGPT to keep the children the same and make the results look like school pictures. It supplied the familiar gradient background. She shared the method on TikTok, where other parents praised the saving.

One commenter complained that pictures for three children cost over a hundred dollars. That’s the commenter’s reported cost, not a national price list. It is enough money to make a person look at a blue background and wonder what the hell is blue about a hundred dollars.

I cannot get angry with a mother for taking her own photographs. I cannot even work myself into a respectable little disappointment about the artificial backdrop. School portraits have never depended on a child actually visiting the mysterious blue country behind his head.

I look at my first attempt. The wall has contributed nothing objectionable. I am the expensive-looking problem in this photograph, and I worked for free.

3. Fix the shirt before fixing the person.

I undo the buttons and start again. Here is an improvement available without a subscription. A professional might have caught it before taking the picture. A good one might also have caught the expression, changed the light, made the whole disagreeable business easy enough that I stopped looking as though I wanted damages.

There is work in a decent portrait. Attention, timing, the ability to deal with a person who has become painfully aware of possessing a mouth. I don’t want to erase that work merely because I can now fake the backdrop.

But neither do I want a family’s affection held to the price of a package. A mother does not owe a photography company a sale in order to establish that the school year happened. She can take the picture herself. She can dislike it. She can take another. The child is still hers to love between purchases.

My second attempt has the buttons right. Now I have tucked in the shirt on one side and left the other side hanging. This is becoming a documentary about supervision.

4. Do not call two different things the same shortcut.

The reporting also describes parents using AI to remove watermarks from professional proofs instead of paying for finished pictures. I stop there. Taking your own photograph and altering its background is not the same transaction as having somebody else take it and stripping away the mark asking to be paid.

I can think a package costs too much without deciding the photographer’s afternoon cost nothing. I don’t need to pretend every company is generous, or every photograph good, to keep that distinction. The person adjusting the stool may have no say over the price. My objection to the bill does not automatically become an objection to paying that person.

I have done the work on my lousy picture. So far it has consisted of a towel, some buttons, and a prolonged failure to look friendly. Nobody else’s watermark stands between me and the result. I am free to make it worse.

5. Try looking happy without proving anything.

This is where I lose another photograph.

I straighten the rest of the shirt, square my shoulders, and produce the official expression of a man whose life has gone well. The camera accepts it. Cameras have always been willing to cooperate with this kind of fraud.

I delete that one.

The temptation is not peculiar to AI. I have wanted pictures to show that I was having a better time than I was having. A clean shirt, a favorable angle, the ugly part of the room left outside the frame. Now the repairs can go further, and I can ask for changes without knowing how to make them. But a replacement background alone doesn’t tell me a parent has started replacing a child.

Sometimes a parent wants one pleasant picture. I have managed to want one myself without becoming a threat to the historical record. My crooked shirt was not an irreplaceable moment. It was a crooked shirt. I fixed it and felt better, a small development unlikely to interest anyone who didn’t have to wear it.

I have drifted away from the phone while thinking this. For a moment I am not arranging my face. I am simply standing there, with the shirt finally behaving, feeling faintly ridiculous about the time this has taken.

6. Take the picture before the feeling improves.

I set the timer once more. I don’t demand a smile. The result looks tired, but not furious. I can work with tired. It has been a reliable associate.

I could put myself in front of blue, gray, a mountain I have never climbed. I leave the wall alone because it would be more work, not because I have become the guardian of reality. Someone else can have the blue. It isn’t sacred.

I save the photograph. Then I notice the bottom edge caught my feet. One sock has worked its way halfway off, and my toes are curling against the cold floor.

I crop above the ankles. There. A man with no problems.

Source: ‘ChatGPT for the win’: Parents are using AI to skip out on children’s school photo day