On photographing babies

A while back I posted a few pictures I took in Richmond of my niece, Greta. Those were the good ones of the bunch—a little blurry, but relatively well-composed and they showed her off to good effect (it helped that she's such a cute baby). Most of the rest I took weren't very good, and on the same day my mother (who, I'll admit, has more of an artistic eye than I'll ever have) took just a few photos of Greta, all of which were far better than mine.

I think I figured out what I got wrong. For most of my pictures, I used the same approach to photographing babies that I use with cats, applying kerri9494's dictum of getting down on the floor and pushing in close. The problem is that, while this works all right with toddlers, little newborn babies don't photograph well that way. They already look like they've got some sort of strange lens distortion applied to them, and anything that serves to further enlarge their heads relative to their bodies will just make them look like bizarre alien creatures. You're better off taking full-length, narrower-angle portraits from further away.

Flying daggers

Killing the master of the Hanging Monastery of Weightless Wuxia was, in retrospect, a bad idea. They sent a flying-dagger woman for me the next day, just before dawn, with one dagger-- one was all she needed. Appearing at the open window (fortunately making just enough noise to awaken me), she threw the lethal blade at me and melted into the shadows of the forest that began just beyond the inn.

I rolled over in bed and the flying dagger missed me by about a millimeter, severing a few hairs on the back of my head. I jumped out of bed, saw the glint and heard the whirring whistle in the darkness near the door-- the dagger was coming around for another try! Thinking quickly, I threw my robe at it and deflected it just enough to send it spinning back out the window.

I figured that was the last I'd see of the flying dagger. An hour later, though, as I sat in the common room in my robe (now with a giant slit down the back) trying to enjoy my breakfast, there was a knock at the door, first soft and hesitant, then more insistent. I got up and opened the door. The flying dagger! With lightning reflexes I somersaulted over it, leaping out the door, and its momentum carried the dagger cartwheeling up the stairs.

The taxi I'd called was waiting outside the inn. I jumped inside, nervously watching for the flash of the flying dagger behind me. There it was, emerging from a second-story window and wheeling around toward me! "To the airport, and step on it!" I cried, hoping to catch the day's only flight from Chaotic Ancient China back to Logan. We made good time on the freeway, but once or twice I looked back and saw the flying dagger gaining on us. I consoled myself in the knowledge that it would have a hard time getting through security.

The flight home was mercifully peaceful. But in the noisy, stinking van lane outside Terminal C, none of the shuttle vans would cop to heading in my direction, damn them. I shouldn't have paid in advance. I was out of cash for a cab-- I went back inside to get some at the ATM. But there, at the back of the line-- the flying dagger! There it spun in midair, flashing as if to mock me. Only by using the No-Shadow Wall Climbing Vault did I manage to dodge it in time, sending it careening off toward the United baggage claim.

I had a couple of bucks, enough for the MBTA. If I could lose the flying dagger in the crowds, maybe I could hop the shuttle bus and make it to the station.

The flying dagger caught up with me again in the tunnel in State Street Station, throwing sparks as it ricocheted between the orange-painted cinderblock walls. I ducked behind a cart selling postcards with pictures of baked beans and orangutans wearing crimson mortarboards. It sliced a Pats pennant to ribbons, bounced off a rack of YANKEES SUCK bumper stickers and zoomed in a straight line on down the corridor. I decided to lose the flying dagger by backtracking and heading home via Government Center, changing to the Orange at Haymarket.

The ruse seemed to work, but the flying dagger was waiting for me in the pedestrian pick-up area at Oak Grove. What followed was an exhausting chase up and down hills, down dead-end back streets and through the tiny fenced-in yards of the local townhouses. At one point, dodging behind the funeral parlor on Main, I faked it out sufficiently to send it spinning up Waitts Mountain, where it would find nothing but old beer cans.

By this time, I had no illusion that that would be the end of it. It probably knew where I lived. I wearily staggered home and made sure the door was locked and all the windows were latched shut.

In the following days of desperate hiding (living on canned soup and congealed leftovers in the fridge), Sam and I would frequently hear the flying dagger clattering against the windowpanes, ripping holes in the screens. It would spend hours just ringing the doorbell. At one point I noticed that the tires of my car had all been neatly slashed as if by a watered-steel blade.

Around this time I began to think about the flying dagger's behavior and wondering whether it really wanted to kill me. For all the studying I'd done of the pictures in the secret Wudan manuals, it was faster than I was. There had been countless moments in the chase from the airport at which it could easily have slit my throat. Yet it chose to follow and harass me instead.

I began to suspect that the flying dagger was driven not by murderous hate but by an obsessive love, a love more single-minded than any animate object could muster. My suspicion was only confirmed by the e-mails, the phone calls that made only a whirring noise, the deliveries of flowers that piled up at the door. I was frightened, but also flattered. Of what was such a dagger capable?

And then came the magical day when, after a brief hiatus, the flying dagger appeared with all the flying daggers of Paris in tow. They offered to carry me off to the magical realm of Flying Dagger Land, but I refused; what of my marriage, of my responsibilities in this world?

Ever after, though, as I went about my daily business, I would have a line of flying daggers following me in single file, reminding me of the joy that might come when, one day, all the people of the world live in peace with the flying daggers, the peace that I have found. May that day arrive soon.