A Perfect Selfie Didn’t Happen

 

Walking on Clearwater Beach earlier recently, we stopped along the way to take a few photos of each other with my new iPhone 7.  We used the portrait setting because it took amazing photos without using any filters.

After we hit 10,000 steps, I wanted to try to take a couple of selfies of us because the lighting was amazing.  It was one of those ‘sort of sunny, sort of cloudy’ days at the beach.
Selfie — it’s an interesting word about an international obession.  A year ago, Nickolaus Hines published a blog about selfies.  He wrote 49 people had died in the last two years taking selfies.  49!  In 2015, a person was more likely to die of a selfie-related accident than a shark attack (28 accidental deaths when taking a selfie and 8 by shark attacks).  See his graph to the left.

Hines also pointed out that in New York City, 61.2 percent of the selfies were taken by women (left).  But in Moscow, a stunning 82 percent of the selfies were taken by women (right)!

Women aren’t the only sex who take a lot of seflies!  Check out this article! It was based on a study by Ohio State University that stated selfie-loving men were more likely to show signs of psychopathy and narcissism than the rest of the population.

Google posted that 24 billion selfies were uploaded in the past year on their Google picture app.  Those 24 billion selfies were only the selfies uploaded to the Google Photos app.  It didn’t include selfies kept on Apple’s iCloud, posted to Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram!

I checked – I have taken 610 selfies in my two and a half years with an iPhone. From the sounds of it, I need to step up my selfie game if I plan to keep up with the millennials. The average millennial will take 25,700 selfies in their lifetime.  Women aged 16 to 25 spent five hours taking selfies per week; and on average, 93 million selfies were taken worldwide EACH DAY in 2014.

I digress.  Back on the beach, taking a selfie with the portrait setting didn’t work that well, but we kept trying.  My arms weren’t long enough.

First I chopped off most of the right side of his face.  Switching place, then, I chopped off most of my right side.

We didn’t give up!  I turned the phone to the side and tried again.  But we couldn’t get my face in the frame.  I just couldn’t get it right!

We laughed each time and continued to walk.  The next set were perfect of me, but I kept chopping my man’s head off.

Then something crazy happened.  A human being, a female, walked by us on the beach.  She had on a University of Arizona t-shirt and she was laughing at us trying hard to get a good selfie.  My husband went to Arizona so they chatted for a second as she offered to take our photo.  The very first photo she took was perfect.

The lesson we learned?  Stop wasting time trying to take the perfect selfie.  Simply ask someone to take a picture. Imagine all the time we would have back had we figured this out sooner!