My Most Difficult Photo Assignment Ever...

That, my friend, is my passport photo.  I'm going to Santiago, Chile in a few weeks and it turns out my passport has expired.  I discovered that fun fact when attempting to flee the country for Toronto, Canada but that's another story for another post.

So it turns out that passport photos have a lot of requirements and subsequently challenges:

• The photo has to be taken with three light sources.  I only have two off camera strobes and it's night time so I can't use daylight as a third source.
• There are brightness, contrast and composition requirements.  From the government website (just Google "passport photo")  you'll see what appear to be over exposed photos, flat images and unhappy subjects respectively.  I pretty much had to fight every creative instinct including the fact that I'm usually quite a happy person.
• My head had to be between 1 to 1 3/8 inches in size and apparently relatively speaking I have a big noggin.  My eye had to be between 1 1/8 and 1 3/8 inches from the bottom.  All assuming a 2" x 2" passport photo.  The application has a square for you to put your passport photo on - it's 1 7/8" x 1 7/8"!  I don't get it.  Did someone wash the application and it shrunk? So what does that mean for the other dimensions?  I have no idea.
• I had to cut the photos down to an ambiguous 2"x2" size that measures an ambiguous 1 7/8" x 1 7/8" size.  With my trusty paper cutter, I cut one photo into a trapezoid and the other into a parallelogram.  But the edges are straight!
• I'm not very photogenic or at the very least no where near as cute as the babies that are typically my muse.

... but darn it I saved $10, a few drops of gasoline and a trip to the mall.  Needless to say, baby photography and family portraits will continue to be my speciality.