Say cheese

This graph was on xkcd. How, exactly, does one die in a knitting accident?


Actually, since this post has gone up, googling "haberdashery deaths" now gets about 22,000 results.

In other news, my Dad and I were talking about photography over vacation, when he gave me my new digital camera. Now, I am definitely a punctum-loving abstract expressionist nonlinear messy type of artist, which means I love "snapshots" over carefully staged and lighted photographs. I also love old manual cameras, the heft and the delicate machinery, the clicks and the adjustments, which is weird because they beg for precision, not abstraction. The digital camera is fun because I can take all the crappy pictures I want, and then I can delete them when I'm in a more critical frame of mind. With a manual camera you have to live with your crappy pictures-- which we won't call crappy, we'll call deep.

So anyway, Dad found this old camera that once belonged to my grandfather-- a sturdy little Canon Canonet QL (something like this but more beat-up looking) he doesn't know if it works or not. There's something about the aperture being busted, maybe? But you can, conceivably, put film into and it will take pictures, as long as you're not looking to take top-of-the-line perfect photographs . I am so excited about this thing! I can't wait to "waste" film with it-- errr, take deep pictures.

Well, Mum has this weirdo idea that I can't get packages at home so she mails them to school, so I get these random packages that have nothing to do with anything that I'm teaching the kids. This particular parcel had a bunch of mittens in it, a couple of sock patterns my Nana used to use (all typewritten, very cool) and this camera. So I took it out and toyed with it for a while, and I forgot to bring it home so the kids found it the next day. They were so gentle with it-- I wasn't going to tell a group of tactile-oriented kids to not touch this thing. They all took some practice aims with it, and squinted through the view finder, and tried to focus it, and they turned the dials and twisted the buttons and took the lens cap off and on-- and they had a blast. I only had to tell them once not to touch the lens and they needed no other reminders. What a great experience they had with that thing. I overheard one of the girls asking some of the kids to pose and say cheese, and a boy remarked that he liked pictures where people aren't posing or looking at the camera better (along the lines of National Geographic, perhaps?).

This afternoon, when one of the girls had some free time, she wore the camera for a good 20 minutes or so and "documented" everything that we did-- but without any film in the camera there was no actual record of the afternoon, but this budding journalist must have taken at least 50 pictures, winding the film before each one, turning the camera this way and that, turning the focus, composing images, trying some close-up and some further back... I think I will have to get some film and let her go at it. Why not? Maybe we can even use the photos in our class somehow... I'll have to think about it some more. If I had the money I'd do a sort of Kids-with-Cameras project, but with limited funds we'd have to work with what we had. It would make for some interesting Fun Friday projects, though...