A One Sentence Description

If you had to sum yourself up in one sentence, what would it say?

If other people were to sum you up in one sentence, what would it say?

How different are those sentences likely to be?

This isn't one of those empathy tests to see if we can understand that other people see the world in a different way to ourselves, rather it's a thought that's followed on from a couple of recent conversations with people regarding mortality.

A friend recently had an accident where her van swerved off the road and down an 8 metre drop into a small river. By the most unlikely of unlikely ways the vehicle twisted, bounced, overturned and landed, she suffered nothing more than pulled muscles and bruises. Nobody in the emergency services could believe she could possibly just walk away from what had happened.

The experience has caused her to reflect and change her priorities in life. "Stuff" seems so much less important. Making sure your loved ones know how much you love them seems so much more important.

As the conversation weaved and developed, one thread that tied in with a recent discussion I'd had with Maggie, was about how much people know about us – and about how the more distant we are, the less can be said.

I could tell you a fair bit about my mother, although there will be an awful lot I never really knew about her. I saw her from an offspring's perspective, never fully appreciating her in her own right probably until after she died.

My grandfather I can tell you a lot less about. I have a few stories of what it was like as a kid going to stay with him, and a few more stories my mother told me about, but it is very limited.

In the last year or so of his life he recorded his memoirs onto cassette, which my mother intended to type up, but didn't get round to immediately. Somehow a few years later, having moved house a couple of times in the interim, the cassettes were lost. Hunting high and low they were never found.

All those stories, lost forever.

And once we go further back beyond the grandparents, we are into one sentence descriptions.

Apparently I had a distant relative who had been on some great exploration of somewhere and had a diamond that went missing after he died and it caused family rifts. Now if you want me to expand on that last sentence, I can't: what I have written there is literally all I know.

On the other side of the family sometime around the late Victorian era down near London, I think I had ancestors that were fabulously wealthy who had built up a major business dealing in sawdust, but the sons gambled and drank away the fortune, leaving their sister – I think my great grandmother – quite a bitter old woman.

So that's all I know about my great grandmother – she was quite a bitter old woman.

For those who do genealogical research into their family histories, they might find a name, an address, an occupation and how many children they had, but it is still a one sentence description – and one that tells you nothing about who that person really was.

Sooner or later we all become just a one sentence description, until that too is lost.

So what do you want that one sentence to be?

Once I'm gone, I do wonder how might others describe me in a few words. I suppose it will depend in what way they knew me.

"Kim had a beard, wasn't very tall, was overweight, and balding, however much he tried to deny it."

"Kim was a photographer, blogger and played the bouzouki" (perhaps words like good, good enough, passable, or not as good as he thought he was, might get thrown in to expand the sentence a bit).

Or perhaps the description would be about my familial connections: "Kim was a middle child, a second son, a father of two, a stepfather of three, a grandfather of four, a husband of one" (again, these might be peppered with words like loving, selfish, adoring, reliable, or unreliable, depending on the personal experience).

Or maybe I might be described by bits of my personality, such as "Kim could talk for hours, barely seeming to pause for breath", or "he was a good listener and friend", or "he was a bit up himself to be honest and if I saw him walking down the street I'd quickly dart into a shop to avoid him".

Or possibly it might come down to one observation a friend made on Facebook recently, which was "Essentially your whole life revolves around ice cream or chocolate in some way."

But all these are external descriptions – what I might appear to be like on the outside – they are not necessarily how I would describe myself.

From the inside, the descriptions are far more to do with fears, doubts and insecurities. My weaknesses dominate my thoughts much more than my strengths. For every one thing I have achieved there have been dozens of things I haven't.

However, others don't see these sides of us, unless we tell them – but that runs the risk of being labelled as someone who moans, or is ill, or insecure – and is that how I would like to be remembered in a one sentence description?

For me, the ultimate one sentence description, the very best I ever heard, was emailed to me to read out at my mother's funeral by an old friend of hers. She said, "Ann was the kind of woman who always made you feel better about yourself."

I cannot think of a more wonderful description of a person.

Perhaps then, this becomes something of a goal. If I want to be remembered not as a bitter old man, but with a certain level of fondness, then I have to work at that

Of course after writing this, it's not impossible I could end up only being remembered as a man who was obsessed with how people were going to remember him...

Festive Wishes

I was supposed to pick up Rogan in Dumfries yesterday at 4.45pm from his 3 hour bus journey down from Edinburgh.

Unfortunately I got a call just after lunch saying he had missed the bus and the next one wouldn't arrive in Dumfries until a quarter to midnight. Then it's another half hour's drive home.

Still better than trekking up to Edinburgh to collect him though.

Despite the late night, it's wonderful to see him after being several months away at university, where he's in his final year studying mechanical engineering.

Maggie has been busy preparing enough wonderful food to keep a small city content, with her bramble ice cream (made from the ones Meg and I picked back in September) being a particular favourite.

Our grandson, Alfie, is 18 months old now – still too young to have any idea what's going on, but old enough to get caught up in all the excitement of boxes and wrapping paper.

As each year passes, I think I become ever more aware of how extraordinarily fortunate we are to have a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and a loving family around us. So many lack one or all of these things.

Whatever your social, cultural and religious beliefs and circumstances, I truly wish you and your loved ones all the very best over the festive season and for the year ahead.

Artists at The Nail Factory

"I lit the woodburner to warm the place up," said Peter as we headed up to the Nail Factory.

He opened the door and smoke began pouring out. I couldn't see the back wall for it. "Aw, not again..." he muttered, disappearing into the thick cloud to open all the windows.

The Nail Factory in Dalbeattie is a very small building that has been turned into a gallery and art space. The intimacy of the place, the pleasant surrounds and the warmth and friendliness of owners Rupinder and Peter, make it a favourite venue for many local, and even not so local, artists.

It was the last day of November: with the closing of the exhibition season, and several of the artists arriving to collect their work, Rupinder was putting on a spread of food, turning it into a social gathering.

Wanting to make the most of a rare moment when so many artists would be in the one place at the same time, Rupinder and I had met up the previous month to discuss how we might create a photo to reflect that sense of artistic camaraderie.

Bouncing ideas about, we settled on the notion of having them gathered around a table, with some art and tools of the trade, in conversation with each other, perhaps with some light food – fruit, bread and cheese: hinting at a feel of a Dutch "Old Master" painting.

Key to this was going to be getting the light right.

Looking at the classic paintings of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals, I realised most of them tended to be lit by single window and/or a central candle. The challenge would be how I could replicate something similar in a small space with white walls (that would reflect the light and make shadows more difficult to create), on a winter's evening when it would be dark outside.

Warning: the next couple of paragraphs contain lighting set up descriptions that might be of little interest to non-photographers so feel free to skip ahead to just past the next image.

I set up an octagonal softbox above and to one side, which gave me a soft overall light, as though coming from a skylight window. A grid on the front prevented too much light spilling onto the upper parts of the walls, but a few places at the table were still too much in shadow. I set up another, smaller softbox just to my right, with a lower light setting, which brought just enough extra light onto the scene without interfering with the shadows I wanted.

Finally, I placed another off-camera flash with an orange gel, just behind the fruit bowl, under the candlestick, to give the look of candlelight illumination on the faces.

Here's an early test shot, before we moved the large softbox further back so as to be out of the photo, and changed the picture on the back wall on the right, which was catching a reflection of the 2nd softbox.


The lighting set up

In a lovely bit of serendipity, I happened to know all the artists who turned up for the shoot – in fact a couple of them I had photographed before (see Fitch and McAndrew - Slipware Potters for Douglas and Hannah, and Baskets on a Beach for Geoff Forrest)

On one level it was a little intimidating trying to be creative in front of a group of creatives, but this was counteracted by the fact they were all really warm and friendly, and happy to get into the spirit of things.

When I say warm, I am talking emotionally. Physically, we were all wrapped up in several layers because opening the windows earlier to clear the smoke, had also dispersed any remaining heat: it was only 4 degrees Celsius outside.


The final image - click on it for a larger version

Rupinder did a wonderful job dressing the table, which has several details I love. The open pomegranate and peel coming off the orange were ideas we lifted from the Lost Chronicles of Gallovidia shoot I did last year; the pheasant-feather quill in a glass inkpot represent the fact a writer's group often use the space; and just next to the cheese and chestnuts is a small note which says, "may contain nuts".

If you would like to know more about the artists involved, left to right we have:
Caro Barlow who works with glass
Erwin van t'Hoff – a silversmith
Hannah and Doug Fitch (and baby Fred) – slipware potters
Phil Crennell – painter and furniture maker
Rupinder Dulay and Peter Dowden of The Nail Factory
and Geoff Forrest – willow weaver

When the shoot was over and I was packing away, the table was carried back into Rupinder's kitchen and an amazing spread of food was laid out for us to tuck in to.

One of the things I love about working in this corner of Scotland is it's not uncommon to be fed, watered and treated like one of the family when I'm out on a shoot.

It's never taken for granted, and it's always appreciated.