Foto-me

thanks to lulu, photoshop, and lulu's little toasterlike playmate, i will never have to spend for ID pictures again. call me a cheapskate, but i'm positively tickled by the thought.

the usual recourse for instant ID pictures was the foto-me ID photo booth outside sm or landmark. i remember being shocked a couple of years ago to find out that a little strip of four 1x1 photos from said booth was php 75.

if you needed 2x2s, you had to go to kodak, where six photos cost php 120. the added cost was because you got to keep the negative, which you eventually lost anyway, making this a pretty good scam for kodak.

but i much preferred the foto-me booth, since for some reason i always looked good in those little instant snaps. of a strip of four, i'd always save one for myself, ostensibly to document my passage through the ages (don't know where my 1x1 chronicles are now, though).

and hopeless romantic that i was (still am), i'd fantasize about hopping into one of those booths someday with a significant other and producing a strip of four gooey, kissy, cuddly and giggly photos -- preferably black and white, as they usually were in movies.

my fantasy bubble was burst when i actually asked a foto-me attendant if two people were allowed inside the booth and she said NO. not that i actually had a significant other to take photos with at the time. it was just wishful thinking (or advance planning). sad.

now that i no longer need it, as i can produce my own ID pictures (with whatever color background is required of me), the foto-me booth has slipped a little bit further into the past. it now sits there with a strip of happy snapshots from my childhood: sunday spaghetti lunches at sm's cafe elysee, ballet lessons and cindy's, art lessons and eskimo pies at coney island in greenhills, and tossing rose-shaped 10-cent coins into the fountain at mercury drugstore.

i'd say it's in pretty good company.