How to take baby's passport photo

Since we are not nationals in this country, Javier has to be registered and a part of the requirement is of course, a passport. What can I do, my son is an alien.

So, what do you need for a Philippine passport? A passport photo and... 200 dollars! @#%#$!!! How can they charge 200 for an infant's passport? Argh. What do they do with that? Grr... As if we had any choice... we'd end up paying 200 dollars to the embassy for our son's passport whether we liked it or not anyway.

If there was a good thing that came out of this passport fiasco, we had fun taking Javier's picture. My god. It must have been 100+ shots before we arrived at the perfect one. There was one other photo session, but my uber-old Nikon digicam circa 2003 did not have enough powers to match Javier's fast-as-lightning reflexes.

But in the end, we succeeded taking Javier's photo with some useful tips from my friend, Boggs, a better camera we loaned from Phyllis and a lot of patience and timing.

Here's how:
1. Know baby's sleeping and waking hours. We attempted taking some shots at 7pm and this is the best we could get. Another disadvantage is that you don't wanna wake a sleeping baby, as this is the time when he will be at his crankiest. So, first, if baby is sleeping and you must take his passport photo, you have no other option but to watch baby sleep and wait for him to wake up.


2. When baby is finally awake, lay him on top of a board with a white background.

3. Be patient. The baby still does not understand whatever you're saying, so just let him play (while you pray for him to be still for 5 seconds).

4. When he's gotten tired of playing, you can now center baby on the white board.

5. Fix baby's clothes so that it doesn't appear too big. In Javier's case, everything is still too big for him, so this is our best effort. (Many thanks to Nannette, Chris and Ryan Ong for giving Javier his outfit).

6. Take photos, keeping in mind that you will not get the perfect shot the first time, or the 99th time for that matter. This must have been our nth try.But we gotta give Javier some credit. Still no more tears in spite of this 'arduous' task we want from him.

7. Nope. Too smiley.

8. Too quirky.

9. Close, but not quite. Remember, we want to take a photo of the front of baby's face.

10. PERFECT!!!! It is at this part that I realize that the best time to take baby's passport photo is when he is pooping! This is when he makes that serious, big-eyed expression for 5 seconds.

11. When the baby gets sleepy, it is time to wrap up.

So there you have it, 11 simple steps on how to take baby's passport photo.