Barking Mad and Afternoon Tea

First things first.  This is January 7, so this is my seventh post on the Fifty in Photos Blog.  One week down.  Fifty-one weeks to go.  Three hundred and fifty-eight days of photos left to post.  What on earth was I thinking when I dreamed this up?  I must have taken complete and utter leave of my senses.  In short, I had to be absolutely barking mad.  A lunatic.  I'm not sure I haven't been howling at the moon.  I have no idea what possessed me.  Perhaps a tragic need for attention.

At some point in time I must have conveniently forgot about my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, my control issues and my proclivity for perfectionism.  All of which spell doom for a project which has a relentless deadline that just keeps repeating itself day after day for an entire freaking year.  Frankly, I can't at this moment imagine being able to come up with a picture, an image, a photo that I consider adequate, for an entire year.


It has suddenly dawned on me that I have just started an ultra-ultra-marathon in which I am going to be running uphill, in combat boots and a kilt, for an entire year.  After a mere week I am creatively sucking for air.  I find myself muttering and saying to myself, over and over, "pacing, pacing, pacing", as if somehow that will help.


I have known Rudi and Gretchen for a number of years.  We met when I started this event in Vancouver called, "Men in Kilts", where, strangely enough, the premise was to throw an evening of festivities based around nothing other than the fact that there existed men who liked to wear kilts.  So, once a month we gathered in our kilts, drank copious amounts of beer, danced to Celtic music and flirted with women who liked hairy men in skirts, er, kilts.  Rudi is 75, likes to wear his kilt and all things Celtish.  He is also a master silversmith and leather worker and he's so skilled I have let him play around with my sporran.  Gretchen is an angel.  Can't put it any better than that.


I wanted to shoot Gretchen and Rudi as they sat around their dining room table, drinking afternoon tea.  On a cold, wet, gray and thoroughly miserable January day I must confess I fell a little in love with the golden glow from the light in the corner of their cosy home.  But I also wanted a snapshot that looked like a picture from a family album, almost a little stilted even.  Perhaps a faded Polaroid.  I got two shots that I had trouble choosing between, which sort of fit my self-assigned design brief, but my favorite shot was of the two of them looking not at me or the camera, but in each others eyes.

I shot this on my Nikon D700, and Nikon 70-200mm VRII f/2.8.  I bounced an SB 900 off the ceiling and an SB 800 through a diffuser.


- Vince Hemingson