Shaky

Off the top of my head, I can think of three things that blighted my adolescent years: my long eyelashes, which made using a microscope nearly impossible; a propensity for blushing; and my shaking hands. Of course, these are, in retrospect, minor complaints but the last two took on a disproportionate significance when I was around girls. It's rather difficult to look cool when you're blushing plus shaking hands can make you look a bit anxious.

Some days the shakiness is almost non-existent and on others it's clearly visible. Once every few months it'll spontaneously be bad enough that I'll suddenly have problems if I'm holding a drink. (I think it might be related to blood sugar levels or similar.)

Still, people have far worse things to content with and, by and large, it doesn't bother me except when I'm taking photos. Which, of course, is every day :-(

It's at its worst when I'm using a zoom - as the problem is amplified - or when I need to do an exposure of more than, say, one second. The former cropped up last night at the Nick Cave gig and then the latter made its presence known, this evening.

Dan and I had been to see the new Thor film -' The Dark World' - at The Brewery. The film was excellent and Dan was marvellous company: at his age, there's time to get deeply into everything you're interested in, so he knew all the actors, all the background to the film and would occasionally lean over to whisper some relevant nugget to me. (Thankfully, I'd had a peek at IMDB before we went out, so I had a couple of titbits of my own to share.)

I'd thought I'd manage to get a picture of him in front of a Thor poster or something but, having waited to see the (second) post-credits scene, we emerged from the cinema with me still short of a photo for today. Walking back to the car, we passed this vaguely - very vaguely! - Asgardian bit of stone work, so I decided to take a picture there. It was very dark, so I knew I'd have to use a slow shutter speed*, which would bring the the shaky hand issue to the fore.

The first two efforts highlighted the problem, so I decided to use Dan as a bipod, resting the camera on his head. He displayed great patience while I messed around with the shutter speed and, well, this is the best I got.

*I'm sure there were other ways of tackling this, photo taking chums: any tips?