Duke's Waste of Precious Time Photography Blog: She Lives in Yesteryear

Got a chance to take a day off work this week and visit my grandmother, who is in a rest home close to my extended family. We had lunch and spent a few hours in conversation with the matriarch. I enjoyed every minute of it. She has been diagnosed with alzheimers, and for her the memories of the past have a stronger grip on her mind than present reality.

Getting a few high quality photos of her was one of the main reasons for my purchase of the 40d. I'm still learning the technical aspects of the camera, and lighting conditions in the interior of a rest home were less than ideal, so I shot alot, did some exposure bracketing, fiddled with settings, and shot more. Almost 200 raw images in all. I'm getting better all the time.

I still hate flash photography. I greatly prefer just taking a pile of natural light photos and ignoring ones with blurs and other defects, and cleaning up the better ones with the image processing program. Flash is just useless to me, it flattens everything out, washes out colors, creates obnoxious shadows, and generally bothers the crap out of the people I'm trying to take photos of, resulting in posture and facial expressions that are less "real". Its hard to help people forget you are taking pictures of them while blinding them every few seconds.

So, screw the flash, here's what I came up with in the soft, orange light of the rest home....

I saw this expression many times and it is heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. She was always the anchor of the family, and now when one of her children talks to her she tends to look at them in the way that a small child looks at their mother or father. Sixty years ago, her children must have looked up at her in the same way, with the same dependence in their eyes, but now the roles have been finally, irrevocably, reversed.

Walden, a frail old friend, was brought by his son for the visit.

We had a few good laughs and I managed to catch a couple of them with the camera. I love photos of people laughing, because people aren't being self conscious about being photographed as they let loose with a good laugh. Its a very natural thing to do and a beautiful thing to be able to record.

The lighting inside was so dark that I was forced to put the lens aperture wide open, giving me a very short field of view. My father and my aunt were sitting right next to each other and yet I couldn't get them both in focus at the same time without resorting to flash photography. Nevertheless, the following two images make for an interesting comparison with each other I think.

I took alot of photos of Grandma's hands. I've been fascinated by them for years. Ravaged by arthritis, gnarled like the roots of an ancient oak tree, they speak a language all their own. She came by these hands honestly, and her finger still bears rings given to her in 1942.

Twin daughters and an only son. I did get a couple of decent, posed "mug shots" outside in better light, but I don't get the same joy out of posed photos that I do from candids.