I Think I Need a Headshot
I was about to sign up for bookshop.org, because it's free and I'm all about free opportunities, as long as they're legitimate. Then I read the tips regarding creating my profile, and one was the usual "add your bio, author photo, and curated book lists". This got me to thinking about the fact that the photo I've been using is not great.
One could leaf through all my photo albums and loose pictures and question whether I ever existed. I was the family photographer at a time before smart phones (there was this thing called a "camera"), so sorry, no selfies. Plus, I was camera shy to the extreme. If I'm being generous, I may have once seen one photo of myself that I found acceptable. Other photos might exist, but not in my possession. Plus, I always found posing for pictures to be awkward. I was painfully shy when I was younger, so having a camera trained on me only made things worse. I was like Chandler in his engagement picture:
And while I once had a few "okay" pictures of myself, I lost them when my external hard drive passed away. There are a lot of things I don't like about Microsoft, but I appreciate OneDrive, because it goes with me wherever I go.
The "headshot" I've been using is a picture I cropped that was taken outside our new house the day we moved in (a long, long time ago). It's not a headshot in the truest sense of the word, but more like a candid photo taken on a happy day. And the image is not sharp; it might be a photo of a photo of a photo (can't actually remember). I tried fixing it in photo editor, but there's only so much a software program can do, given an inferior product to work with.
I read about a service called Aragon AI that will create headshots reasonably cheaply, but a review I read stated that it "only" requires six photos in order to do its magic. I had one. There are other AI headshot sites that require even more. So, obviously, this was not an option for me.
Then a while back, I pulled a (very pretty) box out of my closet that was inexplicably heavy, and when I opened it, I found that it was filled with pictures. I ignored it for about a month before I got around to going through the photos, and among them were some home-snapped publicity pictures of me that my husband and I were going to include on our debut album cover. (We never did.) Now, frankly, most of the photos are really bad, which might be why we didn't use them. However, there is both good and bad news. The good news is, I can now meet Aragon's quantity requirement; the bad news is, I don't possess a scanner, so in order to replicate the pictures, I had to snap them with my phone camera, once again resulting in a picture of a picture. I don't even know if Aragon would accept their poor quality.
And there are other issues. My hairstyle at the time was...different. In other words, not flattering. I had bangs, for one thing. (Who has bangs?) Can I ask Aragon to jettison the bangs? I don't know if it accepts those kinds of requests, but I doubt it.
The big issue would be that the photos don't represent the current "me". The images are old; granted, I was young and wrinkle-free, which is a good thing, but how much misrepresentation is ethical? Although it's not as if I'll ever appear on TV or in a podcast. And I don't think there's a statute on the books about publishing an old picture of oneself, so I wouldn't be hauled off to jail.
The thing is, I'm not writing "Murder, She Wrote" mysteries, where an old spinster writer would seem natural. All my main characters represent a specific demographic, and I'm not eager to burst that bubble, so a younger me is appropriate. Since I write under a pen name, why not a "pen picture"? I could be anything ~ a pony, a slab of cheese, a clothes hanger.
I don't know if Aragon would work for me, but I'm not about to go to a professional portrait studio, so it's that or nothing. But based on image quality, they'll likely reject me, so I'll be relegated to using my current goofy pic.
Does an amateur headshot give the impression of amateur writing? I sure hope not.
POSTSCRIPT: I found that there are several free-to-try sites that will unblur photos, and I ended up trying most of them because each site only allows a limited number of free fixes:
PicWish (I like this one the best, but it only allows 3 fixes per day.)
Artguru AI (Photos will have a watermark unless you subscribe.)
Canva (Even though I pay for a subscription, it still wanted extra payment for the photo app. Nope.)
Adobe Express (I've used it in the past for resizing, but didn't test its enhancing capabilities.)
All the services I tried did a very good job of "unblurring". I'm happy with the results. Maybe I'll try Aragon after all.
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