Picture Pages

A significant percentage of my friends are very talented photographers. My friend Jen sells her work online at this site, my buddy Tim has a tumblr of his work, my friend Karen also shoots professionally, and my next door neighbor reminds me exactly how great pictures taken by a talented photographer with a real camera can be.

I like taking pictures, but come on. Everybody likes taking picture. Having a phone in my camera has made it convenient to take pictures on the spur of the moment, so I take a lot of pictures, and due to the sheer volume I take, some of them are bound to be decent,but for me, composition extends only to making sure that I get what I'm photographing in the middle of the frame.

Lily likes taking pictures too. I'm not sure if she'll be like me or my more talented friends.

My old phone was kind of crapping out on me. It was more than three years old, which is an eternity for a smartphone, and it was suffering the degradation that accompanies long-lived phones.

I had the idea that I would upgrade at the end of my contract and pass my older phone on to Lily. It wouldn't make phone calls, but it was still a camera/mp3 player.

This is what I did, and it actually wound up working out better than I expected. I cleaned up all the programs I no longer needed (it seemed unlikely that Lily would make use of a Battlenet authenticator or Words with Friends) and set it to Airplane mode and it runs pretty well and the battery lasts a fair length of time without all that crap drawing on it.

Lily is wildly enthusiastic about it. She has a few songs (TMBG's Here Comes Science Album, All three Royal Guardsman's Snoopy vs. The Red Baron songs and A kid's bop version of "Hey there Delilah"), but she really loves it for the camera.

She decorated the phone one weekend. Seeing the job she did with it makes me believe that she'll surpass me. Her work was so precise and so diligent.

 

We were at an indoor farmer's market this past weekend and she saw some geodes, which she had never encountered before. She asked if she could take a picture of them. We said she would have to get the shopkeeper's permission. She asked if we would ask for her and we told her she'd have to do it herself. She's sometimes shy around strangers, like any kid, and it was a good test to see how serious she was about it. It would just be easy to say "Never mind" and just not take the pictures.

But she did it, asking in her biggest voice, "Excuse me, can I take some pictures of your crystals?"

And she took a ton of pictures. She was patient about it. She lined up the shot, took the picture, took a second one if she didn't like it and then moved on the next one. She was extremely fastidious about the whole thing. I thought she snapped seven or eight pictures, but she took over twenty.

I'm very happy that she's so meticulous. Perhaps we can upgrade to a grown-up camera in a few years if she's still interested. Having a real camera will put her one-up on me.