The pretty version:

The documentary version:

The fingernails short; the cuticles slightly frayed.

My little fingers are bent inwards. I sometimes wonder if other people’s little fingers are like that.

I have a scar on the side of my right thumb, right next to the fingernail, after an abscess I had as a teenager. Basically a little chunk of my thumb is missing there. I have three more abscess scars, all of them barely visible – this one just happened to be in a place that didn’t heal that easily.

I also have a V-shaped scar on my left wrist, after a ganglion cyst. You can just about see it in this photo; it looks like a slight dimple.

I now have both a tripod and a remote. This evening we tried them out for the first time.

This feels very representative of our evenings. Me trying to do something; Adrian hanging on to me; Ingrid turning everything up to 11; Eric seeking peace and quiet in another room.

The August self-portrait never got done, but here’s one for September. Perfectly boring, but that was the intention: to practice the basics of lighting, exposure and focus. I am a much more cooperative subject than the kids and much easier to practice on, despite the added effort of running back and forth between the camera and my position.

Speaking of which, the second photo shows my “studio” for this session: a messy bedroom with an unmade bed, the window opened wide and the curtain bunched up to let in more light, the lamp cord tucked away to leave the wall bare and clean. The window ledge acted as tripod. (For next month maybe I’ll finally get myself a real one.)

I went to a class reunion yesterday for my primary school class, grades 1 to 9. (Which actually only gave us 8 years together because in the middle of those years there was a school reform in Estonia that added one year to primary education, from 8 years to 9. So I never went to 5th grade.)

Last time I saw most of my classmates was 8 years ago, at another reunion. A few of them I haven’t seen since I graduated.

A few of them I wouldn’t have recognized if I had met them in the street; others are so similar to their 1st grade selves that any stranger could point them out in the class photo.

It is even more interesting to try to figure out how they have changed on the inside. (More difficult to observe, too, of course.) As with the faces, most are recognizable extrapolations of their school-age selves. Had someone told me 20 years ago that here is where this-and-this will end up in life, I would have nodded and said, yes of course, that figures, I can believe that. The quiet and studious teenager who now has a PhD; the poet’s son who has now published books of his own and studies history, etc.

Others surprise, with life and career choices that I wouldn’t ever have pictured. Which might well mean that I really didn’t know them as well as I thought.

With yet others I realize that despite our 8 years together I never knew them at all. I meet them now as strangers, effectively. Some of them have grown up into nice, interesting people, making me wish that we were not such strangers.

Two observations that, while not at all new, struck me with renewed force yesterday:

• Some people really are photogenic in a way that has nothing to do with being pretty or handsome. The way they hold their body and move around, the way their face and hands move, just looks good in a photo almost regardless of when I press the trigger. Others look awkward in photos without doing anything that looks or feels awkward in real life.
• Alcohol is such a natural part of all this events for so many people. I don’t think they could imagine a get-together without alcohol. As a non-drinker one is never specifically excluded, but as the hours pass, alcohol changes the discussions and the mood in such a way that excluding oneself becomes… well, not inevitable, and not the only option, but the only comfortable option.

Evening:

Morning after:

Posts about previous reunions: first, and second.

Envious of Ingrid’s headbands, I went shopping for one for myself. My hair is getting long (because there is always something more important to do than to sit for an hour at the hairdresser’s) and it gets in my face when I’m outside, mowing the lawn or digging in the dirt.

To my disappointment, my choice was very limited. Black or white. Several variations of each, but still, not a single actual colour to be found.

Now I look like a pirate when I mow the lawn.

Pirate Helen

Pirate Jack

Everybody has a smartphone these days. I don’t. And I have no intention of getting one, even though I kind of like our iPads, especially for long car trips, or for that “dead time” up in the bedroom waiting for Adrian to fall asleep.

Everybody has a smartphone, and it’s always in their hands. In the train station, half the people are blipping on their phones, playing whatever latest game they have. Once on the train, even more people take their phones out. Eyes down, no contact with the world around them.

Friends sitting at a café, next to each other, each one with a phone in their hands. Mums on the train with their babies, ignoring the baby’s talk and even cries, blipping on their phones.

In the street you can easily spot them from a distance: it’s the people who are walking slightly too slowly, absent-mindedly, not quite in a straight line, getting in others’ way because they don’t even look up to see where they’re going.

I am by now so fed up with seeing this incessant phone-blipping everywhere that, by extension, I am fed up with the idea of smartphones. I feel a twinge of distaste when I think of them.

You could say that it’s not the phone’s fault. It’s the people using the phone. But at the same time it is inherent in technology that it changes our behaviour. Smartphones are made to be always with you, always on, always offering that titbit of entertainment, of distraction. The constant blipping is part of the soul of the smartphone.

For the same reason I resisted buying a car for many years. Owning a car changes your behaviour. Yes, it enables lots of new things, good things, nice things – but there is no denying that now that we own a car, we cycle much less.

Once you have acquired this subtly life-changing technology, it weasels its way into your habits, and will be difficult to get rid of. You own the thing, and the thing owns you. Even though I don’t like owning a car, I would not get rid of ours, now that we have it.

Or perhaps this is just general age-related Luddism. All these new-fangled gadgets! Kids these days! Etc etc.

Adrian has discovered face painting. He likes being painted, and he likes to paint. Sometimes Adrian and Ingrid paint each other. Ingrid paints flowers, strawberries, hearts, or just colours that Adrian chooses. Adrian also very kindly asks which colours Ingrid or I want, and then applies them with great care, concentration and tenderness.

Yes, I am wearing the same fleece jacket as in my previous self-portrait, AND the one before that. I do own other clothes, and even other fleece jackets, but this one is a favourite.

At this point I am second-guessing just about everything in all the photos I take, but something is better than nothing, and this is better than what I’ve managed before.

I’ve been spending more time and effort on photography recently, and would now say it’s one of my main hobbies. (Along with blogging, textile crafts, and gardening.) In general I’m making an effort to balance all the “must do’s” in my life with more fun and creative activities. All work and no play makes Helen a cranky mum.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my camera, from a Nikon D40x to a D3200. The new one does video (which I haven’t had a chance to try out yet) and has 11 autofocus points instead of 3, plus various other nice features.

Along with the new hardware I also decided that it was time to learn new things. Previously I mostly used shutter priority or aperture priority modes; now I’ve switched to manual mode most of the time. I also switched from shutter button focusing to back-button focusing, and from auto white balance to the preset modes. (I don’t quite feel up to managing fully manual white balance yet.)

Using manual mode has been working out much better than I expected. I don’t always nail the exposure but the results are at least no worse than before. And the photos turn out more predictable and consistent: previously every photo in a batch would use slightly different settings, because the camera decide to slightly tweak some setting or other, but now they’re all the same, which makes post-processing faster.

Manual mode requires more thinking and effort, which is both good and bad. Every photo takes more time, so I miss some shots because I’m too slow. But it requires me to pay more attention to what I’m doing, and makes the whole thing more interesting. Just enough of a challenge.

The more I practice, the less I like what I achieve, and the more I see how much there is for me to learn. But whenever I feel discouraged, like I’m not getting anywhere, I scroll down to my photos from a year ago and look at how much I’ve learned since then. Look at those chopped limbs! Look at the weird framing! Look at the missed lighting opportunity – why didn’t I take that picture from the other side!

One particular project that I want to tackle is self-portraits. I’m the only one who regularly takes photos in our family, which means that I have lots of photos of the kids (whom I see most), some of Eric (who is at home less) and almost none of myself. Twenty years from now the kids will be able to see what they looked like, but not what I looked like. It’s like I was missing from the family.

It turns out that you really need a tripod for effective self-portraits. I’ve tried to make do without, but it’s hard, and really limits the angles I can use. (For the photo below, for example, I would normally not have faced the direction I’m facing, but the only support I found for my camera was a pile of books on my desk.) So now I’m thinking of buying a tripod. And perhaps some more prime lenses, too… The purchase of one piece of gear triggers a cascade of others.

I’ve also realized that our style of interior decoration – with colour and patterned wallpapers – and the general clutter we have everywhere is not helpful for getting good photos. The colours and wallpapers will stay, because I value this warm, colourful atmosphere more than I value having convenient backdrops for photography. But the clutter I can do something about. Case in point: these cupboards really need doors.