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.

Photo by Jon Dodd

---

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