I feel like everywhere I turn at the moment, I see photos of teenage girls, long hair swept to one side, head slightly tilted and mouth shaped in a seductive pout. They’re all at it, even my daughter and her friends have started doing it. Any chance they have and they’re taking pictures of themselves in said pose. What happened to standing tall and smiling for the camera?

When I think back to my teenage years, I can (just about) recall being horrified at the mere thought of having a camera pointed in my direction. Every pose should have a caption underneath it that reads ‘just hurry up and take the bloody picture so I can get this over and done with will you?’ Prior to these tender years, I had a well practised camera pose that involved standing very straight like a soldier and beaming widely.

I’ve never managed to perfect the art of the natural smile for the camera. To this day, I vary between open mouthed smile, that’s supposed to look like I’ve found something funny, or closed mouth, gentler smile that either makes me look miserable, or as though I’ve got something stuck up my arse. It’s the reason I’m rarely in a photo and I hate the result of pretty much all of the ones I appear in.

It doesn’t seem that today’s teens have this problem though. They love the camera and know how to work it. Perhaps it’s because they’ve grown up in the digital age. You can edit and delete to your heart’s content nowadays, whereas back in the day, you only had one chance to get it right. The pressure was on and oh the disappointment when you ended up with red eye, or eyes half closed for that matter. What a waste of film!

My daughter is into photography and she took a shot of me the other day that I ended up using on my Facebook profile page. It was ok, as far as shots of me are concerned, but do you know why that is? I wasn’t bloody looking at the camera or taking any notice of what she was doing. Like I said, when it comes to posing, I’m rubbish and to prove a point, we thought we’d have a laugh and try out the pout…

“don’t tell anyone, but these fingers are actually stuck here”

Nuff said.