Alice picture

So I want to generate a really good photo of "Alice" to use as pretty much the only physical prop that's actually in the game. Alice, as many of you are aware, is intended to be NPCed by the lead female GM-- that is to say, until I allow anyone else to run it, me, making the corresponding photo of the same. Alice is intentionally a prop-light game, but this one was always supposed to be included. I never managed to get around to taking an Alice photo for the first or even the second run. By the third run Jared decided enough was enough and that we just needed to take a goddamn picture to give to the character who was supposed to have it. This fact inspired the following amusing conversation tonight, from two of the players that previous had the character who possessed it:

zapf: "What prop? I spent that game staring longingly at an index card."
lightgamer: "Same here."

At any rate, we snapped one in five minutes the afternoon before the game, printed it out on an index card, and handed it personally to Ryan, who was the player in question for that run. I was glad to finally have one in the game like there was supposed to be. Up until that point I had simply been relying on selectively giving out her character number to indicate whether people in the game knew her by sight. In larps, I use character numbers to indicate the recognizable "face" of the character-- that is, if you know a character's number, that means that you recognize what they look like. If you knew that Alice's character number was #XX, then you knew her face.

At any rate, however, I was not really satisfied with the picture taken. I have a tendency to never like photos taken of me-- while I like how I look in the mirror, I never feel like photos ever really represent me the way I see myself. There's always something wrong with them, like my hair looks flat or my skin looks terrible or there's something off about my mouth or nose or ears or SOMETHING. I keep telling myself it's okay if I don't look supermodel-gorgeous in the picture because Alice is not supposed to be all that pretty and it's okay if the pictures don't look exactly like me because they're not supposed to be of me but of Alice. Still, I wonder if I could do better. I would really love to just set aside time to get into costume and character and take a million pictures until I was finally satisfied. It may be that I have a very firm image in my head of what it's supposed to look like, and I really would like to achieve that. I'm just concerned that I'll be too self-conscious about not looking beautiful in the photograph that I'll portray Alice as this pretty little girl that I want to look like rather than the way the character actually looks.