It is school picture time again. Freshmen pictures had to be pre-ordered and paid for sight unseen. Unbeknown to me, the high school freshman made a last minute change to his wardrobe and chose the same color shirt as the color I specified for a background. His picture will look like a weatherman in a green shirt aka floaty hands and head. When they get the picture at Christmas, it should be fun for the older relatives to choose between complaining about the length of the teen’s hair and the teen’s missing torso.

Senior pictures are four full pages of proofs and decisions that are weightier than they should be because of the heavy price tag. For $500 I could have them on a CD, but since I don’t have half a grand for pictures, I’d still have to pay extra for prints and we still have to buy graduation announcements, I think I’ll spend more time staring at the proofs. It’s easy to stare at them, because they are great pictures. Even though it’s a treat to see the girl teen without her face hidden or sticking out her tongue, she looks absolutely beautiful. The pictures that include one of our dogs are funny and I have to have them just because the dog posed for only a few minutes before trotting off to frolic in the creek while pictures continued sans dog. One of my favorite poses is on a green screen.

Let’s look at the backgrounds that can be added as an afterthought. There’s are five different versions of crumbling brick or cinder-block walls for anyone who spent their school years painting, cleaning and fund raising to salvage their deteriorating school building. If your student minored in train car and overpass tagging, there are eight graffiti background choices for you to remember their unbridled creativity. There are only five beach and pier options for students whose parents have a coastal timeshare, but they also have two extremely tropical backgrounds for families with serious island property. There’s a paint splattered warehouse door background for art students and a fire damaged curtain background that looks like it survived The Phantom of the Opera for theater students. There are several indescribably odd backgrounds, like some kind of sideways log cabin wall with a whiskey barrel in front of it or the one with train tracks and a train coming toward the student. There are four tree backgrounds that seem appropriate for our area, but since the candid photos include REAL trees, that seems an unlikely choice.

I wonder if we can just use the green screen as a background.