Another Fauxtog Fad


sit on sis

sittin on dad

Not sure how to pose your subjects? Why not just get them to sit on each other! That’s not awkward at all.

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18 Comments

  1. I had a someone try to pose my boys like this once, I said NO!! I can’t believe the parents liked this!!!!

  2. This was a good idea for like 10 minutes. And only the one where the bottle is replaced by a beer bottle.

  3. I have actually done this with my daughters to some degree. If done at the right angle and if they are placed right it actually makes a pretty cool sibling picture. (Before you all get started I came in really close and got just their upper bodies in it.. it made my younger daughter look like she was hugging her sister.) It’s all about perspective. This though.. I have to agree is very unimaginitive and awkward.

  4. I worked at JCP Portraits…and…we had to do this…I quit soon after.

    • Molly

      Came here to say this. So many things that I see on this site I was required to do when I worked at a Walmart photo studio. It was a soul-sucking job.

  5. My personal opinion is that like almost any pose, it’s all in the execution. In and of itself, the stacking or dogpile poses aren’t universally awful, but it’s certainly not an exposure I’d recommend unless you’re extremely experienced with that sort of pose.

    I guess I see it like this: Before I touched my first DSLR, I spent over a decade in the video industry. One of the “sacred rules” in film and video editing is that you either do a cut or a fade when you transition. None of those barn door, iris, wipe, or other nonsense transitions; they’re hokey and professionals never use them. Except one night, I was watching Star Wars through “editor’s eyes” and to my shock, I realized that George Lucas used PILES of those “hokey” transitions. Seriously, next time you watch it, just look for the number of wipes in the film. Yet despite breaking a sacred rule, Star Wars is considered one of the best films of all time. At the end of the day, it’s sometimes okay to be unconventional. It might even add to the experience.

    All of that said, the big (and I mean semi-truck big) caveat to that is that you have to know what you’re doing. Lucas had been editing films for most of his life, and had 12 solid years of editing in Hollywood before Star Wars happened. His other editors had nearly as much experience. So with 40-some combined years of filmmaking experience, they had the wisdom to know the look they wanted, and could pull those transitions that even then were typically considered poor editorial taste.

    Personally and candidly, I’m not at a level where I’d feel comfortable doing poses like this. I could probably pull them off well enough to make the parents happy, but as we’ve seen over and over on this site, a happy parent doesn’t equal a good exposure. Maybe another half decade down the road I’ll have the experience and confidence to pull off a shot like this and make it look good, but hopefully by then, the fad will have died and I won’t have to worry about it.

    One can only hope.

    • Funny you should mention Lucas’ numerous wipes in Star Wars. I liked them too, and noticed that they were not used nearly as liberally (if at all) in the latter three SW movies. I have often suspected he was trying to achieve a look reminiscent of 1940s theater serials…right down to the opening scrolling prologue. It was film brilliance…which ALMOST makes up for Jar Jar Binks…almost.

      I agree with you too about this sort of pose. A more experienced photographer might have better intuition for lines and composition..not to mention knowing how to arrange everybody so that nothing looks terribly…inappropriate?”

  6. They remind me of lizards posing like that. If you don’t know what I mean, just google ‘bearded dragon family’ and you’ll see the resemblance. Also, is no one going to address the Christmas sweaters? They have actual Christmas tree lights on them lol!

    • Christmas…when all standards regarding tackiness go straight out the window. I’d not be surprised to learn that the shirt also plays “Grandma got run over by a reindeer” over and over.

  7. ManOfDeath567

    Meh…. the pose may work in some situations but not all. Of course, you don’t want to provide a portrait gallery full of people sitting on another person.

    But the lighting, color, and exposure all seem okay.

    • Don’t know how to actually spot a fauxtographer? Just keep throwing shit and eventually some will stick. This site wasn’t updated for a week, was really hoping the admin had suffered some kind of debilitating stroke or something.

      • For a guy who has never had a single positive thing to say about this site, you sure seem to come back a lot. Methinks you secretly like this place. Maybe you’re even a bit envious of the popularity it’s got. πŸ™‚

      • Because it’s a train wreck and no one can look away from a train wreck.

        I’m completely in awe not only of the completely failure and competency of the admin who runs this, but way certain people seem to lap it up. I’m not the only one who complained, I’m just the only one who stuck around to see it through.

        And I said something positive. There wasn’t a crappy post for nearly 7 days. Sure, it’s because they didn’t post anything, but it’s a step in the right direction.

      • You need a friend, and I’m always up for an impossible challenge. Sounds like a great team, right? πŸ™‚

        So, ol’ buddy ol’ pal, I had to chuckle at your contradiction. When your first sentence says “Because it’s a train wreck and no one can look away from a train wreck.” and then one of your last sentences contains “I’m just the only one who stuck around…” it’s hard not to see the glaring contradiction there. Surely, if no one could turn away, then the mass hoardes of haters you mention would surely be here to get your back. Maybe a new release of Warcraft came out, and they’re busy.

        The other option is maybe you got derailed yourself somewhere in the sentence between the two. It’s probably all the unnecessary anger over petty issues. That stuff will turn you into a mean, cantankerous old codger that nobody wants to be around if you’re not careful. Once that happens, and you have no real friends or family left who can stand to be around you, you’ll probably spiral into a pit of despair, becoming so desperate for attention that you’ll do stuff like troll websites in hopes of finding people who will so much as give you the time of day, even if it’s just to tell you off. Oh, wait…

        Oh well. Either way, have a great day.

        Your BFF,

        Jim

  8. Well Jim, here is how I see it:
    There are tons of posts that have been made here where numerous people lined up in the comments to state that they weren’t fauxtography. This is the chief aim on this site. You have more than one of those and it starts to look like you really don’t know what you’re doing.
    On top of that you have an admin who utterly refuses to engage the users, and hides behind fake names in the about section. It’s one thing to use a handle in a comments section, it’s another to introduce yourself as the owner of a website as nothing more than “ginger and mary ann”, especially when you’re failing so hard at that website. For all we know, it’s you posing as a regular user.

    So you’ve got someone claiming to call out “fauxtographers” for their failures who is failing on their own and can’t even take responsibility for their own actions. Not even a “hey sorry I posted that picture that obviously wasn’t fauxtography, we’ll improve the process” instead we get silence and follow-ups of more pictures which clearly weren’t fauxtography. I remember a little run a few months back where there were like 7 out 9 pictures in a row multiple people claimed were just fine.

    Even beyond the utter incompetency at running the site, we have someone who has been caught red-handed violating IP laws and stealing pictures without permission. I’m not talking about these posts, but the blog posts. The use of these photos may be covered under fair use, but fair use isn’t permission it’s only used as a defense in court. However, the first blog post that came up had an image in it, which clearly didn’t belong to the poster, and the admin had “credited” to some site, but the site was just a random image hoster. After much investigation, I found the original image, posted by someone on their own site, not remotely connected with where they got it, with all rights reserved, despite all that, the image is still there, and the admin hasn’t apologized for the outright theft or demonstrated that they have any permission to use the photo (which they clearly don’t since they didn’t even know where it actually came from). They were too incompetent to notice the watermark on the image.

    Sounds like a trainwreck to me. I don’t know what else you could possibly call that.

  9. This trend…is bad.

  10. It’s a horrible pose, and I don’t see why it would be anybody’s favourite, but it’s not a new trend.
    I have a similar photo of me and my cousin (which we we both hate), and it was taken 12 years ago at an Olan Mills studio.
    It’s probably supposed to look fun and playful, but I find it horribly unnatural, and a little bit embarrassing for the child who is being “ridden” by their sibling.

  11. roycebennett

    I’ve seen this at my kid’s pediatrician’s office. It was of my pediatrician, naked with his wife directly on him, and oldest kid to youngest kid. Stacked like my photo frames I have yet to hang up yet. It was done in black in white on canvas in 13×20. Probably the scariest thing I have seen of my pediatrician.

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