Alexandra Hill ’28 is a prospective English major and creative writing minor. She does research at the IIC Conservation GIS lab and is a member of Vox. When she’s not submitting her columns late, you can find her yapping, daydreaming, or dancing really badly. Contact her at abhill@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
This article is about a terrible mistake.
It all started in a fit of boredom. As I watched the Colonial Williamsburg tourists amble by, I sighed and wished for a spark of excitement. Dear friend, many stories start this way. Not all have happy endings.
Dying for an adventure, as I had been since I read too many “Percy Jackson” books as a child, I clicked on a mysterious link in a mysterious email and entered my personal information.
Now, you may think you see where this is going. It was a phishing scheme! I was hacked! My computer virus is writing this very article!
Well, dear friend, I wish that were the truth. First of all, that would save me a lot of work. Secondly, it would rescue me from an even more tragic fate.
A lovely group on campus was hosting a red carpet event. They posted an announcement requesting paparazzi. There it was! My spark! Ignorantly thinking that anyone can take photos, I eagerly signed up. Little did I know, this innocent notion was a flaming lie, capable of setting my pants on fire.
This was the perfect opportunity to practice my budding (nonexistent) photography skills with low stakes, since after all, “paparazzi” is plural. I was assured there would be many backup experts to take the real photos.
Perhaps this is a lesson in jumping to conclusions, but unfortunately, when I reported for duty, a disappointment awaited.
Ten minutes after I arrived, I waited eagerly for some professional-looking people to appear. Shouldn’t the GlamBot guy be here, after all? But as the clock ticked toward the event’s start and people began to conglomerate on the beautiful red carpet, my heart dropped.
Camera case from Swem Library in hand, I was a lone “paparazzo.”
Clearing my throat, I fiddled with the camera buttons, trying to keep my face smooth and placid, like someone who had seen a camera before. I massaged my imaginary goatee in what I viewed as a photographer-like fashion.
Everyone at the event was incredibly sweet. They kept thanking me for coming and asking if I needed anything. I tried not to reply, “Would you mind taking the photos?”
It was too late for that, as people already strutted down the red carpet in tuxedos and pretty dresses, looking fantastic. I raised the camera to my eye, fumbling for the theoretically user-friendly photo-taking button. The flash went off, much like a lightning bolt had struck the interior of the Sadler Center. They smiled, posed again.
Click, click. Pretty smooth, I thought. This isn’t so bad, I thought.
That is, until after about half an hour, when the camera began to malfunction.
Frowning, I looked down at the display and cocked my head. I even double checked that I was pressing the right button (yes, I am capable of pressing the wrong button on a machine with essentially one button.) A busy signal flashed on the screen. I waited for smoke to come out — the perfect excuse to stop taking photos — but nope. It was the terrible sort of half-way broken.
“Oh, that’s new. Just one moment,” I muttered, in a not-at-all panicked voice. I glanced up at the group of fashionable people, their faces frozen in the awkward smiles that emerge when it is unclear whether the photographer is doing their job or not.
It turned out that the Swem camera needed about one minute to recover between photos from then on. I got a lot of those special smiles.
The final hurdle was, well, seeing the photos. You see, I had glanced at them previously. Upon further inspection, however, they revealed themselves to be … the work of a faux-tographer.
Point A: If the sun ever goes out, we can all use the flash on the Swem cameras as a source of light for photosynthesis. Pretty much every photo turned out overexposed (thank you, Google, for the photography terminology).
Point B: Surely, if I did not take good photos of anyone, then I could at least get everyone in frame. Well, dear friend, don’t be naive enough to believe that. To the person who was cut out of the group photos (I can tell you were there because I can see the edge of your hair), my sincere apologies.
My sincere apologies, in general, to the wonderful and talented people on the red carpet that day. You posed artistically, you came in style. The paparazzo, however, did you dirty.
Here, we get to the moral evaluation of my actions. Would Aesop conclude that one simply should not attempt new things in case one becomes the evil undoer of a red carpet? Perhaps. However, if one never attempted things one was underqualified for, then one would never try anything new. In fact, one would never become qualified for anything.
So, I am not discouraging trying new things. However, be warned, you might accidentally cut someone’s head off (from the picture, that is). It is delusional to expect a beginner, or an anybody, to be perfect.
Shockingly, some of the photos I took that night were good. Some were okay. Of course, some were downright terrible. But guess what? It wasn’t the end of the world. Those pictures might not have been Instagrammable, but the universe did not combust. The Swem camera is another story, though.
