What kind of photographer could make Kerry Washington look bad? Or turn an idyllic beach shot into a haunting nightmare? Make a candlelit dinner into a memory you want to hide?. Boyfriends and husbands.. Women across TikTok and Instagram have been sharing their partners’ not-so-faithful renditions of them. Felt pretty, then I opened my husband’s camera roll, many of them say. Other women contrast the offending shots with the much more cinematic photos they take of their partners. The photographer may be a boyfriend, a spouse or someone else, and the setting may be on vacation, at home or standing in front of the Eiffel Tower at golden hour.. Perfect light and pose notwithstanding, these men are proof that affection does not always come with an eye for angles.. Kian Lawley, who posts comedic and lifestyle content and lives in Los Angeles, has learned the hard way that many people already have the photograph mentally mapped out before handing over the phone: the pose, the background, the way the light falls just so.. His biggest mistake, he said, has been improvising.. “Listen to them,” Lawley, 30, said with a laugh. “Don’t try and do anything that you think might be better.”. Lawley admits candid photography is where he struggles most. Those spontaneous moments he finds authentic — someone laughing, eating or fixing their hair — are exactly the moments that get him in trouble.. Story continues below this ad. Do husbands really suck at taking photos? (Photo: AI). Blinks. Strange faces. Windblown hair.. A recent trip to France drove the point home. The backdrops, including Paris streets and the South of France, were postcard-perfect. Yet somehow he still botched the photos he took of his fiancee, while the ones she took of him looked “like they were shining in gold,” he said.. Though the worst photos never see the internet, Lawley and his fiancee’s sister sometimes laugh privately at them. The merely bad ones might appear, but only with the subject’s approval.. “Try your best,” he said. “Don’t take it too seriously. At the end of the day, at least you know your photos will come out good, because they’re in the hands of your wife.”. Story continues below this ad. Professional photographers say the problem is not love but geometry: Bad angles are a common culprit.. Jenn Ackerman, a Minneapolis-based photographer, warns against the classic mistake of holding the phone too low and shooting up toward the chin. Few faces benefit from that view.. Lighting is another issue. “If the light looks bad in real life, it will look bad in the photo,” she said, suggesting that subjects face the light rather than stand with bright sun behind them.. The stakes have also been raised. In an era when photos are often destined for public viewing, what counts as good enough has changed.. Story continues below this ad. Actress Kerry Washington recently posted about the phenomenon, sharing a series of images on TikTok that included a
