I hate having pictures taken of me, because I cannot smile, no matter how hard I try.
I mean–I can pull the corners of my mouth up. Without using my hands even. But the result is never taken seriously by anyone. People think I’m joking around.
I’m not. I cannot smile. I do not know how to do it. I am baffled that you are able to.
Smiling is involuntary. The voluntary muscles just don’t work that way.
Very frustrating issue I’ve dealt with my entire life…
[/blog]
What happens when you think happy thoughts? Think about the person you love most in the world, wining the lottery, having your fondest wish come true? None of those put a smile on your face, even involuntarily?
I smile all the time, especially when I’m nervous or upset, because it does make me feel better. I also have a smile that I like to call the “high beam” because it has such a high level of intensity. I can use the high beam to make almost anyone smile, even strangers and crying babies. But it’s also what happens when I’m feeling good about something, even if it’s just something silly I read on the SDMB. It’s turned on now just because I’m writing this.
I’m wondering what will happen when your twins arrive. Maybe they will turn on your smile. 
I can smile on command, but the result tends to look cheesy and forced, especially when someone’s taking a picture and wants a big toothy grin. When I smile normally I don’t show my teeth so the results when I fake it tend to be more of a"Hulk Smash!" expression.
I can totally empathize… any “posed” picture looks highly unnatural and (IMO) much worse. The only thing that helped for me was paying attention to what my face feels like when I’m genuinely smiling or laughing, and trying to recreate that from muscle memory.
I realize it sounds overly clinical to put it that way, but it helped make photo time much less painful for me!
If I’m trying to force a smile myself, I’ll usually start by thinking about my abdominal muscles and try to make them “tickle.” When I’m taking posed portraits one of my standard instructions is, “Smile from your gut.”
I can’t say for sure that those techniques work to create “authentic” smiles, but in theory they make the subject think about something other than their mouth, and maybe the subject will smile just from the general silliness. If I remember correctly diaphragm contraction is something that happens during authentic smiling.
That’s my advice. Think about your stomach and see you can make a smile spontaneously pop onto your face.
Not a twitch. (Thinking about things doesn’t make me happy, as far as I can tell.)
If I can manage to remind myself of something funny in just the right way, I can luck into a smile, but that’s rare.
I didn’t say I don’t smile, I said I can’t smile on purpose.
Incredibly, this seems like it might work, based on some preliminary testing.
Having some nerve damage in my jaw reduces my fake smile ability. But genuine smiles start up by the eyes, pulling the whole face upwards. Real humor gets a smile going on me, and I can fake it a little by arching my eyebrows and tensing my cheeks.
Remember that episode of Friends where Chandler couldn’t smile for a picture…yeah, that’s me. The only decent pictures of me are one’s that are taken when I don’t know there’s a camera pointed at me or I already have a smile plastered on my face for some reason and the camera person says “Ready 1…2…–” and I interrupt to say “Stop counting, take the picture” because if they lose moment, it’s probably gone.
When I watched that episode I almost forgot that he’s a professional actor and actual has no problem smiling on cue with cameras pointed at him.
Think evil thoughts 
Just laugh like you heard an amusing joke, and then freeze. People with plastic smiles tend not to use their eyes. Laughing fixes that.
I’m the same way - hate having my photo taken, can’t smile on command at all. I simply look like I’m baring my teeth. Not attractive. I agree a genuine smile involves your whole face, especially the eyes - but faking that is hard for some of us, apparently!
I don’t think any of the tricks offered in this thread would work for me…what I do is joke around with whoever is taking the photo and hope that s/he’ll catch a genuine smile. More often it looks dorky, though.
A few times a year I attend “girls night out” parties or functions, and one of the traditions (sigh) is a group photo of all of us - which gets facebooked and passed around. Everyone else manages to have brilliant, happy, pretty smiles. I’m the one looking like I’m trying not to fart in public.
/not photogenic at all.
I have a friend that is one of the photogenic people I know. I don’t know how she does it, but pull out a camera and she can just smile. It’s actually kind of neat to watch.
I had a teacher that once mention in passing that there are muscle that sort of go from your mouth towards your ears and muscles that (sort of) go from your mouth up towards your eyes. He told us (and he could have been wrong, he was a pysch teacher) that when you’re actually smiling you work both of those sets of muscles and ‘photogenic’ people are people who can voluntarily work the ones that go up towards your eyes so their fake smiles look real instead of just looking like their mouth is stretched out. Might be totally wrong, but it made sense.
Before my daughter arrived, my mother (who is really nice actually) once said that when I try to smile in pictures, I look either like a complete idiot’s grin or a homocidal maniac’s leer.
Strangely enough once my daugther was in my arms, I was able to smile naturally while holding her.
Now she is almost six, and I no longer hold her, and we are back to the idiot/maniac problem.
But then I can never fake any kind of facial expression.
I am in much the same boat as the OP - the smile I attempt at http://www.nouilles.info/sdpix/27554.html does look really forced, doesn’t it? Might be better described as a smirk. If I try to raise the corners of my mouth more than that I invariably raise my eybrows. As a baby I was able to smile unselfconsciously ( http://www.nouilles.info/sdpix/27554b.html ) but seem to have lost that as an adult. (BTW the photographer told me a lot of people were that way, and that I’d need to widen my mouth to what feels to me like an exaggerated grimace for the photograph to show a barely visible smile. A good thing I do not live in the US where the social semantics of a smile are much different from my native Germany.
I have the exact same issue. If you look at my family photos, military photos, etc. of me through the years, I invariably look like I’m modeling for an iodine bottle label.
Can you expand on this?
I echo your sentiments exactly. Catch me by surprise smiling; that’s the only way to get a good pic of me.
I can’t smile on purpose either, and I noticed that two of my younger relatives–who are very pretty girls when they don’t try to smile, --look as though they’re straining for a bowel movement when asked to smile for a picture.
Thanks to the SDMB, I no longer believe this is a recessive trait encountered mainly in my family.
Me either. Good to know I’m not alone.
Best I can do when having my picture taken is a smirk. And I only do that because many years ago an old GF of mine told me I have the cutest smirk.
So, um, yeah… Based on on girls opinion of me some 15 years ago has basically defined the way I take pictures.
:):D:) (just because I can)