My 60th birthday—time to reboot

Over the decades I’ve come to realize that sharing ideas with my children can be dangerous. I take a silly little notion about taking a funny photo for my 60th birthday and mention it to my daughter, Amanda, and the next thing I know I look like, well…like I do in the photo above. I had something a bit more tame involved, but Amanda has a nutty sense of humor, so she gets credit for the pink knee brace, the bottle of ibuprofen, and the underwear on the outside. 

We set the shot up in front of our old farmhouse on a balmy (for Maine) January day. I put on a 300mm lens, mounted the rig on a tripod, pre-set everything, gave Amanda some final instructions, and then sort of skidded down the road a hundred feet or so (scary, since I had about $1,500 work of camera in my left hand). It was pretty late on a very grey day and so I had to push the shot to ISO 1600, and even with that we were limited to about a 250th of a second (which accounts for the slight softeness). I wanted a dynamic shot, so I’d twist as far as I could clockwise, count to three, and then spin back to center while Amand blasted away. This was the image with the most movement in the flowing bathrobe.

The funniest thing about this little shoot was waiting for traffic to go by. It took several takes to get enough frames so I felt confident, and in between I had to just stand there by the side of the road and look normal while cars drove slowly past. I just smiled and waved.