Daddy's Little Girls

Sorting through some long-overdue-for-sorting boxes I found some old pictures. Including a batch of photos my friend Julie took one fine day.

I think Julie was living in Prague at the time, so she must have been back for a visit. Looks to have been an overcast day, and I stopped by her parent's house with my honyocks.

I remember Ted, Julie's Dad, giving the girls donuts, I have the mental image of Molly really enjoying her almost-as-big-as-her-head donut.

And as we were chatting, Julie went and grabbed her cameras and started shooting. She was still shooting film, I guess this would have been right around the time when digital was starting to get good enough for professional photography. Maybe. I know for a long time, digital meant a huge investment and a compromise on quality.

So Julie just started clicking away. Cut some flowers for Emily, directed us a bit. Then she gave me the rolls of film.

I get accused every once in a while of being a good photographer and I'm always like, not really. I mean, Julie is the real thing. I shoot a lot, and a lot of times what I get is mostly junk. In 100,000 shots, you're bound to get a few winners.

And that's with being able to chimp, to preview on the camera's screen what I'm getting and make adjustments on the fly. Adjustments you would have to switch to a different kind of film for, for example, by switching ISOs to get more or less light sensitivity.

I think Julie had two Nikons and a light meter that day, no reflectors, no flash, no fill lights, just the natural light on an overcast day.

I took the film to the lab, they developed and printed them and I got it back. And really, every shot is good. Some are better than others as far as facial expression, shadows, that sort of thing, but they're all at least good shots. Actually probably better than the look here because scanning a print, you lose a little. And color correcting scanned prints, I hardly ever get the colors quite the way I want them.

I think too, this was right around the time Molly's autism was diagnosed.

She started to get some language, then lost it. And she started to get spotty on responding to verbal instruction. One day hollering 'Stop!' would actually slow her down as she was on her way to some act of mayhem or other, then it was like she couldn't hear us.

I can see it a little in these pictures. Throwing Mo up in the air would get a reaction, but most verbal inputs from me or Julie or anyone else just bounced off.