The Lockdown Beard - and Episode 43 of Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres

I never liked shaving.

Apart from the hassle factor, my neck would always come up in a rash, which would still be there  the next time I needed to shave, so running a razor over a the top of it would lead to quite a bit of pain and discomfort.

By the time I was leaving my teens I'd had enough and decided a beard was the way to go.

I was in my mid 20s when I met Maggie, so she has never actually seen my chin.

For the last decade or so my beard has primarily been in a goatee mode. Every few weeks cheeks and jowls have been trimmed right back as close as the clippers will allow, while the hair on the upper lip and chin has been longer.

Perhaps seeing my face on the podcasts every week made me more aware of the scrappy nature of my face fuzz, and I started thinking about getting an electric razor. Overwhelmed with the vast array of options it took a few more months before I finally took the plunge and bought some kind of mid-range thing that was on offer and had OK reviews.

There was never any intention to lose the chin hair, but the sides were to be tidied up properly.

If you look back at episodes 30, 32, and 34 you can see my cheeks looking remarkably smooth, but that's as far as it lasted.

3 shaves, and it's not been back out of the box.

There was a loose plan to get back to it into the new year, especially as this is now by far the longest I've gone without trimming the jowls for over a decade, but I've found at least 3 reasons for not getting round to it.

One, of course, is I can't be bothered. Motivation in January is always a struggle at the best of times, and when we add the pandemic effect to the mental health then I just can't find the energy to feel guilty enough to do something about it.

Another is I'm kind of fascinated by how my face is changing. The last time I had a beard of even this short length, my face was an entirely different shape. I'm over 20 pounds lighter now than I was at the beginning of Lockdown last March, and the beard is changing the shape of it again.

And then, my wife loves a beard, especially on me – she always has. And while she has never insisted my facial hair be any way other than how I want it, it does make a bit of difference to know I can be slightly more fanciable to the love of my life.

Meanwhile, on Monday I did the still life shoot I was talking about, with huge amounts of help from Maggie. There are times when it is extraordinarily useful being married to someone who is both an artist, and someone who eats lots of fresh fruit and veg (thereby ensuring we have such stuff in our house). Editing still has to be done, but the images will be ready for next week's podcast, so do tune in!

Below is last night's...

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0:00 - Welcome, what's coming up, greetings and comments
3:14 - Story behind the "Coast to Home" photo shoot for Castle Douglas High School Young Enterprise Group.
29:30 - Critique of images submitted to the Facebook Group, "Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres"
40:30 - Balancing reflected light
59:10 - suggestion to reduce the size of your images for Facebook to 2048 pixels wide to minimise over-compression
1:06:07 - Coming up next week
1:18:00 - End

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