As the Tantrum rages on over whether to put your kid’s photos online, recent circumstances compel me to respond to one of Nathan’s points: “In fact,” he wrote, “only Matt has actually ever put his kids’ pics on this blog.”

I want to point out that I’ve never used Sasha’s picture gratuitously. She appears only when it’s necessary to illustrate a post (and when I don’t feel like scouring the Web for a CC-licensed image to steal borrow). As is the case today. To whit:

The other day, when I picked the kid up from daycare, her teacher presented me with the accompanying batch of school photos, but it wasn’t until last night that Jean and I fully inspected them, with horror that quickly transformed into uncontrollable bouts of laughter. As they like to say on Boing Boing, look at these pictures—just look at them!

Now, Sasha’s a pretty photogenic kid, but in these images, with their cheaply greenscreened backgrounds, she looks awful. Uncomfortable, awkward, unhappy. Check out the one with the bear—she looks like she’s presenting you with a corpse. Oh god, and her hair!

I haven’t seen such insane photography since, well… since I was in elementary school. Which is kind of comforting: Though we can all shoot RAW and adjust the white balance in post, and get our photography lessons from Flickr, and take as many shots as we want on our way to becoming kind of decent amateur photographers, still the same old weird pros are taking the same old weird pictures, with the same awful, DayGlo backgrounds. We don’t have many traditions in my family, but at least now we have this.