Every birthday is special but as we get older our way of celebrating changes
I wanted to end the year on a high, fun note and none of our photoshoots this year has been any more fun than when we celebrated Emily’s 30-something birthday. I say 30-something because a) once a woman crosses the 30-year-old threshold one doesn’t bother with the number one’s column, and b) I never can remember the exact number anyway. Emily seems ageless. She hasn’t changed much from the young woman I met 11 (12?) years ago who kept me engaged in conversation about classic literature for eight hours. To some extent, celebrating her birthday is like a gratuitous nod to a calendar that doesn’t affect her.
There’s also the fact that Em’s birthday isn’t in December at all. Her birthday was all the way back in September. That’s when Brian Logan looped me in on a group chat suggesting we needed to take pictures for Emily’s birthday. Big surprise, as is the case with most 30-somethings, logistics was an issue. We couldn’t find a date when the three of us were available until mid-November!
As it would turn out, this was my last shoot of the year. Everything else since then has been processing and getting ready for art show submissions. For it to be the last gallery post of the year seems appropriate.
Of course, when we process Emily’s photos, we have a commitment to make sure they’re not boring. So, from the start, we gave the images a little extra push, keeping them just short of animation. Then, for every fifth image, we did something completely different, choosing alternative styles that, on one hand, increased processing time by three-to-four hours per image, but also added even more levity to the situation.
My unending thanks to Emily for having a wonderful sense of humor and letting us make a complete mess in her kitchen. Thanks also to Brian for his fantastic lighting assistance, and Ron Miller for helping with the cleanup.
I think this is a fantastic note on which to end 2019. This has been an interesting year, to be sure. Here’s to hoping the pictures only get more fun going forward. Don’t forget, click on the thumbnail to see the image full screen.
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