the first installment in an ongoing saga whereby yours truly boldly attempts that ‘trial by bureaucracy’ known as ‘renewing his irish passport’…
as mentioned before, with my current irish passport being out of date, i’m unable to avail of the ‘instant issue’ scheme whereby you travel to baghdad, get kidnapped and are then instantly issued with a passport by the irish government’s ‘department of publicity seeking empty gestures’. so i have had to adopt the much slower ‘actually filling in an application form’ method.
today - the passport photograph…
one advantage that an irish passport has over its UK counterpart is that, even in this day of digitronic full colour output, you’re still allowed to use a black & white mugshot on your application. this is a ‘good thing’ because, as all students of photography know, it is a hell of a lot easier to make someone look half human in black & white than it is with a colour photograph.
so it was that last night found me seated in the kitchen in front of a white curtain strung between two of the cupboards, a desklamp shining in my fizzer and mazza squinting down the barrel of the ixus at me, while i tried to look sensible. a task made more onerous by the fact that we spent most of the time in fits of giggles. i guess my face doesn’t do ‘neutral expression’ very easily! eventually, after mazza had fired off about 20 or 30 shots, i had enough material to work on. so it was into photoshop with a few likely candidates and a bit of messing around wi the ‘desaturation’ and ‘levels’ controls to produce a black & white image that didnae immediately make me want to vomit when i looked at it.
there then followed a marathon session wrestling with that fuckwitted epson stylus C42+ printer of ours, which if i’m really, really lucky and the gods are smiling on me might, just might, produce one decent print in every three or four attempts. i won’t go into the full details of the tedium i endured, trying to get that malignant plastic ink-squirter to behave but eventually, and on my last sheet of photographic paper, i managed to get a set of decent prints which wouldn’t have me squirming in embarrassment every time i presented my passport to a customs officer.
next stage - finding someone suitable to endorse the photos!
