Passport Photos

Passport Photos ©

By

Michael Casey

As usual I had no idea what to talk about then reality gave me an idea, even though I wish it did not. My big daughter lost her seasonal bus pass, with just 2 weeks left of term time, but the pass lasts till the end of July. So I was was not very happy, so after we moaned and told our daughter she was just like her uncle, he’d lose his arse if it was not tied onto him, as my mother used to say. She went to the shop to get a new bus pass. Only she needed a new passport sized photo, so she had come home like a fool, and we had no spares at home.

This is when it got interesting and funny. She took a photo of herself, then emailed it me to print off, only you have to print it to the size of a passport photo. By doing it ourselves we save a fiver, though if she hadn’t lost her bus pass we wouldn’t need to save a fiver. So I printed the photo on colour paper, I’d bought some ages ago so we had plenty thanks to the Pound shop. Only it came off full size A4. So I tried again, still the same result.

We decided to consult Dr.Google it told us that a passport photo was 35mm x 45mm, so armed with that information we put the photo inside a word document. Then we dragged it smaller and tried to print it. Now my daughter looked as if she was in a hall of mirrors at the fair. I decided to print again on the same piece of paper, hoping it’d go in the space. Only it printed on top of the same photo. Now it looked as if Picasso had taken the photo of my daughter.

Then my daughter noticed I had magnify on the word document, ratio 189%. So I reduced to real size and tried again. This time the picture was better, only my daughter’s neck had been squashed, no longer an elegant swan, now a stumpy little robin. We tried a few times and then finally a 35mm x 45mm photo, or as near as we were going to get. That would have to do.

I used to have software that let you print a whole sheet of passport size photos but that seems to have gone on one of my updates to Windows 10. But at least Picasso would have bee pleased with my  efforts, and I do remember seeing some of his stuff in Barcelona in Feb 1999. Then I tried chatting up a girl with great hair and an American accent, who I discover the next day was a Russian ballerina, who happened to have a broken nose, but maybe it was Picasso doing her makeup in Las Ramblas.

Pictures are strange, and passport photos are even stranger, so you have to keep your sense of proportion in life and in photos, or you end up like a Picasso image.