Photography

Here is one difference between how Hugh and I take photos of ourselves for Instagram. I take a photo, might put a filter on it and add some stickers… that’s it (occasionally I might just erase a blemish). Hugh takes lots and lots of photos and then picks the best one. He goes to the beauty editor in an app and fiddles with it, turning up the brightness and smoothing everything out. He goes through with the concealer brush tool as well. He sometimes even slims down his face and makes his eyes bigger. THEN he’ll put a filter on it. Yes he is more of a teenage girl than me. I know it’s common all around the world to change how you look in photos, but it’s a big thing in Korea.

I’m always surprised at how photoshopped many Koreans’ passport photos are. We don’t even really have that option in Australia if you do it the normal way. You go to the post office, they take your photo. It looks terrible, but that’s normal, and then you put it into your application right away. When you get your passport the photo now looks even more terrible, but is probably an accurate representation of how you look getting off a 10 hour flight anyway.

I’ve heard that some Korean people have actually had trouble getting through customs because their passport photo had been photoshopped too much.

Do you think people just expect online photos to be photoshopped now? And that of course people look great online and it’s not surprising when you meet people in real life and they don’t look anywhere near as good? Will our minds just adjust to that?