The intricacies of passport portraiture

In order to travel to Mexico this summer, we are now required to have passports. Elise has been diligent in expediting this process for us. She called me at work at 4:45 this afternoon and said she and Maly were close to the downtown post office, and I was to be front and present to have my photo taken and fill out the passport application. I was at the post office 15 minutes later only to find that we were too late.

Elise and Maly had come from Walgreens after having Maly’s passport photo taken. While at the post office, we learned that Maly’s photo would be rejected because she had a barrette in her hair. So, we left the post office and headed back to towards the house with a stop at Walgreens.

It took Elise, me and Rodney, the kid running the photo desk, to get Maly to pose properly (sans barrette) for her “correct” passport photo. That process proved to be painstaking. At one point, Rodney had customers waiting for him at the counter, so he handed me the Kodak Easyshare point-and-shoot camera and told me I could take the photo.

So there I am, my child is standing on a chair with a projector screen behind her, which blocks the employee break room, and I’m in charge of the Official Walgreens Passport Photo Taking Camera, which wrote to a floppy disk and was powered by vacuum tubes.

So I took the passport photos of my daughter in a makeshift passport photo studio at Walgreens that resembled my 6th grade social studies classroom.

And I had to pay $8.66 for the service that was rendered.