Fraught With Peril

Posting pictures of our guests to social media is an easy and fun way to promote our show. I post pictures of guests our viewers see on the show and guests our viewers may have missed!

The vast majority of our guests are truly worth documenting! Global Montreal Morning News features some stellar names; from such international stars as James Blunt, Sarah Brightman, Gino Vanelli, Roch Voisine, Chris Hadfield and Jason DeRulo - to such iconic Canadian names as Caroline Ouellette, Roch Carrier, Conrad Black, Anthony Calvillo, Measha Bruggergosman and Mikael Kingsbury! On top of those more recognizable guests, we get so many wonderful locally-known scientists, athletes, artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, actors, chefs, newsmakers, experts, analysts, columnists and more. Montreal attracts a high caliber of individuals and for that, we are fortunate.

Media outlets in smaller markets may not have that same range of potential guests.

No noteworthy interviewee has turned down my requests for a picture. I tweet the photos and post them to Facebook and Instagram. There can be challenges, but the guest in the photo isn’t usually the problem; the problem is more often the photographer. The photographer, typically, snaps one quick, ill-considered photo and hands my iphone back to me.

Inevitably, someone in this casually captured single moment could look better! Often, it’s both the guest and I. The single picture is often badly framed, poorly lit, blurred, unflattering, or includes part of the photographer’s digit!

I can’t count the number of pictures I’ve deleted because they’re purely unpostable!

The only person who gets it right is co-host Camille! I can rest easy when Camille snaps the picture. It’s well framed, well lit and there are several alternate pictures available. Whew!

If she’s not in the studio when I need the picture taken,  I’ll stall, keeping the guest there until she returns. If she hasn’t made it back in time, then, reluctantly, I’m forced to grasp at straws.

Actress, singer, jewelry designer and entrepreneur Caroline Neron came in for an interview right before Christmas. Caroline is always energetic and fun. After the interview, with Camille unavailable, I handed my smart phone to Caroline’s publicist. I urged her to take more than one picture, warning a single picture often ends up with me or a guest looking “like this”; I made a face.

The publicist laughed and announced she had just snapped that picture.

I reacted to her announcement by sheepishly blurting “oh no”, after which the publicist announced she had just taken that picture, too!

It’s such a basic and simple thing and yet the picture snapping process is fraught with peril, I tell you! Where’s Camille when you need her?

Thanks to the patience of Caroline and her publicist, we eventually got it right and I tweeted t a visually appealing picture.

A couple of weeks ago Olympians and newly-crowned Grand Prix figure skating champions Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford came in for an interview. Camille wasn’t around and not wanting to oblige them to linger, I hastily recruited someone else to take a picture. When I looked at it afterward, it was so dark I wasn’t able to post it!

I much prefer looking at my photo selection and saying, “oh, nice” instead of  “oh, snap”!