Teeth

I decided recently that for each day of 2010 I will take a photo of myself, in a way that provides some context to the day, my environment and what has been going on. The rules I want to impose are that there must be one photo a day and I must be in the photo in some way. It doesn't need to be all of me, so long as I am in there.

I thought I should give it a trial run, because a) it is going to be tricky and self portraits are not easy, and b) it could be really boring and perhaps I'd be better off taking photos of other stuff. I don't have that huge an ego, really.

I'm starting with the theme of teeth. I was attempting to show you the tooth in question that prompted the photo but it is at the back of my mouth and not very easy to take photos of. I have a partially erupted, impacted wisdom tooth that is infected and causing immense pain. I've never had toothache before so I'm most unimpressed with this. I'm off to the emergency dentist later.

I settled with this photo because it tells a story as it is, and serves as a little introduction to me. My teeth aren't straight and lovely because my dentist never finished off the treatment with braces when I was a kid. I had a few teeth pulled out because my mouth was too crowded and during the process of having two pulled, I shut my eyes and clenched my jaw and accidentally bit through into the dentist's finger, making it bleed. Occupational hazard I suppose. I'm deaf and didn't hear everyone shouting at me to open my mouth again. I guess that didn't go down very well.

The crack in the front of my front left tooth (on the right in the photo) I only really noticed a few months ago but I suspect was from the fated night in '98 when I fell off my bike and landed face first on the kerb. I thought I'd broken all my teeth but surprisingly they stayed intact. Not so much the broken nose, split lip, and grazed face. With a mouth full of grit, sitting on the kerb under the orange glow of the streetlamp I clutched my face and mouth and watched as a car drove by and slowed down, full of faces staring out at me, and then drove off again.

Nikon D700 105mm, f/5.6 1/2500 ISO 320 (oops!)