How to Spot a Psychopath

When I read Michael Ciuffo's "Rip-off Photography" article, I did not immediately see everything wrong with the picture for which this unfortunate gentleman's mother paid hundreds of dollars.

OK, he looks like a huge dork. But I look like a caveman in photos. Big deal.

At a glance, you can see that the lighting on his face is strangely even, and he looks significantly airbrushed too. But there's more. Read the article for the rest. It's as entertaining as those Celebrities Before And After Photoshop pieces, in its own way.

(Don't miss Mike's ultimate guide to building a minifridge into a 1998 Toyota Corolla, either!)

By the usual standards of terrible studio portraits, though, Mike got off pretty lightly. List of the Day's Great Olan Mills Photos will scrub from your mind all memory of Mike's embarrassment, replacing it with things indescribable.

(When I was a kid, I had hair exactly like that of one of those children. Not for a thousand dollars would I tell you which one.)

What's a good portrait look like, you might ask?

Well, here's a picture my friend Katy took of me in 1998.

(I'm happy to say that I still look pretty much exactly like that, if a bit fatter now.)

On film, ambient light, subject significantly toasted on nitrous oxide at the time. Perhaps that's what warded off the Caveman Curse.

Katy's photo doesn't try to make me look like a matinee idol, or some insecure housewife posing for chaise-lounge-and-feather-boa "glamour" pictures. That, by itself, is half the battle.

I do feel obliged to mention, however, the pinnacle of my own experiments in self-portraiture to date.

If you click the mercifully small thumbnail, you'll get a 1024-pixel-wide version. I'm not even going to provide a link to the 2048-pixel-wide version; edit the URL yourself if you simply must see it.

All you need is a fisheye lens, and you too can see yourself as an urRu!