Amanda Takes Off...

Yesterday Good Man and I took some pictures of each other. All photos shot in RAW and cropped and lightly color corrected in Lightroom. Again, all photos were eyeball metered.

Almost all of these photos break one of the most fundamental rules of composition: don't put the interesting stuff directly in the middle. But sometimes breaking the rules works.

Seeing Me in Good Man's Eyes

When Korean Eyes are Smiling...

Good Man has brown eyes, like every Korean I've ever met. (Koreans don't have eye or hair color listed on their driver's licenses. As far as I know, neither do the Japanese.) But sometimes, when the light hits them right, they've got a blue cast to the edge of them. I haven't been able to capture that on film yet. His eyes are so brown that I can always see my own reflection in them. So you get the fish-eye lens effect behind me, the curving sidewalk, for example.

Cat's Eyes

A few Fridays ago, Good Man and I were walking past an eyeglass store when I declared, "I want those!" Twenty minutes and 116,000 won later (about $125), I had a sales slip for two pairs of glasses, complete with the thinnest, lightest frames available. I got the exact same style in green and blue. Glasses are so cheap here. I will be stocking up before I leave, because six pairs of glasses and one pair of prescription sunglasses just aren't enough, apparently.

I also wanted to photograph eyes because they are so interesting from a social standpoint here. Cat's eyes, single vs double eyelids and that Epicanthal Fold. The fold is that stretch of skin that runs over the inner eye in many populations around the world (including babies from most cultures). It apparently makes the eyes look cross-eyed sometimes, smaller, and wider apart than normal. "Normal" meaning "European." My students will say "he has big eyes" or "she has small eyes" at least twice a week. In America I remember people pulling the edges of their eyes out to look "Chinese." In Korea, I've seen Koreans do that, but I've also seen them push the edges of their eyes inward to look like "roundeyes."

Reflections

Near where we were taking photos there was a security guard's booth, though I've never seen a guard in there. The inside of the booth is dusty and there's a mirror there. Good Man took a photo of us. I thought I would see us looking at us. I didn't expect the reflection of his shirt in the glass we were facing.

Me In Me

Me Over Me

The two photos were hard to get. Autofocus was certainly confused, as was the in-camera light metering system (thank you, eyeball!). I focussed on my reflection in the mirror first, then my reflection on the glass. What's also interesting is how the sharpness of the bush reflection in the glass changes in each frame. Shutter speed and aperture were unchanged. Photos were shot vertically and then cropped down.