I mentioned in "Marriage Preparations " that prior to a wedding in Taiwan, the bride and groom-to-be go to a wedding studio to have stylized pictures taken of them wearing a variety of outfits, including the bride wearing a wedding gown or two. Ours were done on 28 September and yesterday we got the final results, which I hesitantly display here for all to see!
The process, for us, took 9 hours and included shots in the studio and then a drive out to our wedding reception venue where a further set of pictures was taken. We changed into five different outfits, with each change necessitating a change in Pei Han's make-up and hairstyle as well, procedures that must have taken at least 2 of the 9 hours in total.
Before the shoot started I had insisted to the boss of the studio and the photographer that I wanted our pictures to be as natural as possible and when we went back 2 weeks after the shoot to make our selection from the approximately 150 shots taken, I was quite pleased with the results. We initially narrowed the number of pictures down to 72 and then ruthlessly cut more until we had a final 30, ten more than we had planned on and which cost us a further NT$8000.
A few days later we went back to check on the layout of our pictures for the album that the studio was going to put together for us and to my horror all the pictures had been digitally reworked. I now looked like I was 25 years old! My wrinkles were gone, I had no lines around my eyes when I laughed or smiled, my teeth were whiter than a tub of Dairy Maid vanilla ice cream and my skin was smoother than it has been since I was 10 years old! I was fu-ri-ous!!! "This isn't me!" I said to the boss. "You have taken what was false to begin with and made it even more false! Change all these pictures back to their original form!" The problem was that I did look good in those reworked pictures, damn good, so I finally settled on them not making my teeth so white and restoring a few lines here and there to make me look a little more natural.
But, I was still fuming. I couldn't stop thinking that we were paying NT$28 000 for what I regarded now more than ever as unnecessary garbage. I am just thankful that the whole thing is over now. We have our pictures and album and I will never have to go through all this ever again.
All that remains is to hear the ooing and ahing by the people who will now see our pictures and their comments on how much younger I look. Thanks for the reminder!
Dion Marc Delport
4 November 2007