Glass Card Ballet
The school run with an anthropomorphic avocado, love is an 85mm lens, and a very '90s apocalypse.
It’s the school run but not as you know it. I’m up and relatively at ‘em for quarter past seven and brush my teeth before curling up next to AD for five minutes. She decides that the anthropomorphic avocado I brought her back from the airport in Rome shall be joining us for breakfast and so he supervises Cheerios and school uniform the-donning-of while I take a fairly rapid albeit scalding shower.
I get into the office a little gone nine, after a longer “weekend” off and my desk has been turned into a familiar pho of crusty 35mm cameras, digital gear, and miscellaneous cables that make up for about 90% of my in-tray. Nestled amongst the semi-bridled chaos is a rather tasty and recently serviced Nikon F2, a Pentax K1000 (also eminently shootable for those who would grok film), and my archetypal lazy boi go-to, the Canon AE-1p…this one has seen better days. There’s also a bag of Pentax glass; specifically a very nice K mount 28mm, 135mm, and an oddball breed of 28-85mm macro zoom made by Vivitar that I found in the office at home and bought in to sell to Kit Kat. We make the exchange and old treasure is new treasure once again. Glass like that needs a good home and it deserves to be shot. They’re not making any more of it.
Lunch gets skipped and I barrel straight into what’s not quite the inaugural studio session of 2026. It’s a maternity shoot which is a little different but a nice surprise. I unpack the whole lighting/backdrop shebang from its Xmas hibernation, opting for lovely off-white (oyster, allegedly) backdrop that we picked up toward the end of last year, before discovering that none of my chargers have been functioning as intended, i.e. charging anything at all for the past twenty-four hours…
Someone who shall remain nameless suggests that the organisational layout of my charging infrastructure and its proximity to the beverage infrastructure might be to blame for this. I banish them to the phantom zone, smother a panic response and throw every battery I can find into whatever spare wall sockets are available and carry on regardless with the set-up.
One almost expects to begin seeing her repeated to infinity inside the eye inside the eye inside the eye etc
The new Sigma 85mm 1.4 does not disappoint. It is a lens that moves, nay shifts paradigms. I shot Eller on it just before Xmas and well…you can judge for yourself. There is a jpeg of that shot on my phone and I zoom in repeatedly and it just keeps resolving. One almost expects to begin seeing her repeated to infinity inside the eye inside the eye inside the eye etc,. I wouldn’t normally care about this kinda thing to any real degree but it also renders shadows and shapes faces in a way that’s nothing short of stunning. Someone call 911.
Cardpocalypse was a game that I played…most of and loved back when it came out. I say I played most of it and that’s mainly because I was not enjoying trying to play all of it on my Mac and that is where I had purchased it. I never owned an original Switch but now that I have the sequel, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t or wouldn’t make the trip back. Plus, it was on sale over the yule break and I picked it up with a few other titles for the price of a poorly performed Pokérap.
I am too close to both of their demographics to be objective in real time and I think someone knew this
At this point, the Venn diagram of their respective audiences (those birthed in the ‘90s and those whom recall hyper specific playground contraband) is effectively a circle and as the crow flies, it might even be a sphere? Or a ball. Who can say. I am too close to both demographics to be objective in real time and I think someone knew this about me personally when they made it. If the game itself wasn’t so expertly crafted, the environment and period specific aesthetic is a phenomenon unto itself.
One could make the case for the addition of a third set to our diagram, featuring persons owning one of these devices and a reliable cross section of the population would still have an unrivalled time. The Mac/desk situation was simply never cosy enough and therefore far from ideal for these reverent feels. The lounge armchair however, is perfectly situated for handheld mode and thus premium evening real estate. All early indicators would suggest that this is one thing I might actually finish in 2026 and I am weak to its type in the extreme.
I settled for severely uninspired store-bought paella for dinner. I took it out of the microwave halfway through and chopped a few crab sticks with some hot jalapeños into it before finishing the job. If I recall, that newish John Wick ‘Ballerina’ show is on Amazon. It’s…something I watched and might watch again? Much like my modified paella, it’s passable if not radically palatable.
JD out.