[image description: A dignified white-feathered creature in a colorful cravat is giving serious side-eye to a colorful muppety creature with sunglasses and an alarmingly wide smile who has got his pink fingers on the shoulder of the main photo subject. Text reads “Intrusio, small god of Photobombing, 233”]
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Hey, kid. Welcome to the studio. We got it all—props, backdrops, cameras that’d make your momma leave your poppa for a career in photojournalism. Whatever you need, we can provide it right here, under controlled conditions.
Why here? Why not out in the big wide world, where you don’t need a backdrop, just a sunset, and you never have to pay for lighting? It’s a good question. It’s a common question. It’s a question that tells me you’re new at this, because no one with any actual experience would ever need to ask.
Let me tell you the scariest story any photographer ever hears. No, it’s not about a haunted camera or ghosts in the film. It’s worse than that.
You line it up, the perfect shot, everything shining and splendid, once in a lifetime, ready to capture the moment. And when the shutter closes, HE is there. Every good frame of film, in the background HIM. You can take ten pictures to get three good ones. Well, HE won’t be in the seven bad ones, even if he logically ought to be. No point in spoiling an omelette made with bad eggs. But in the three that should have made your fortune…HIM.
Intrusio. Small god of Photobombing. If it’s not the god himself, it’s one of his avatars, wrong person, wrong place, right time. He’s been getting more creative since the photo adjustment software’s been improving, but the programmers have started to mutter in their dark little rooms about a guy—just a guy—showing up in the background when they didn’t put him there.
They say he’s always looking at the camera. That he always shows too many teeth, but they’re not sure he’s smiling.
Anyway, studio shoots are safer. Less divine attention, if you get my drift.
Less risk.
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Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:
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Lee Moyer 