Movies, cats and friends from the past
"Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that´s why we´re all interested in movies - those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it´s actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way"
/Tim Burton
This is Elin. Also born in Luleå. She became my friend for a period of time when I was an au-pair outside of Paris. We both were about 18 by then. So that is a very long time ago. But the memories from this era still remain very clear; both happy and emotional. I worked with two children - a girl who was 3 and her brother who were 5 years old that year - in a small village outside of Paris, called Mareil-le-Guyon. South of Versailles. A tiny place for a young girl who want´s to experience all the fascinating scenarios in the big city. Mareil-le-Guyon had about 280 inhabitants by then and I had about 280 wishes to live the happy life. So I used to go visit Elin during the weekends. She was an au-pair in the middle of Paris and lived next to her aupair-family´s flat in a so called chambre de bonne (a small room for the maid). She basically had room for her bed, a little shower and a hot-plate. And for a mattress. which I used to sleep on after our nightly adventures. It was a happy period in my life but also painful sometimes. But we had a blast.
I also visited Paris a lot by myself. I used to wander the streets for hours and watched a lot of movies in different movie theatres. I covered everything from the most horrifying movie I´ve ever seen; the black and white Eraserhead by David Lynch to commercial american movies. And obscure french ones. I was watching movies all over Paris.
It is somewhat funny that Elin is now a movie critic. She recently asked me if I could take some pictures of her to use as byline images. She needs it sometimes when she´s writing for magazines, like for example Metro.
These are some of the photos I got for her. The weather-and light conditions weren´t the best the particular day of the planned photosession in Gamla Stan, Stockholm. Time was limited and and she needed the portraits pretty quickly. I used 1600 ISO to solve the problem with the light. I had a blast. We´ve lost a little bit of our close contact since those days in Paris. But now we´ve decided to hang out more since we live in the same city again.
This is not Elin. It´s my cat Syrsan. I used ISO 800 on these two photos and faced problems focusing and measuring the light on the cat. If you don´t succeed getting focus directly on the object - in this case the cat - it will get too dark. That is if the camera is measuring the light coming from the window instead. I managed to get focus on one of her eyes anyway.
And she gives me that look again, from where she is sitting on the window seat watching snow flakes falling. So adorable. I didn´t think of it until now. But in a way she has some traits in common with my friend Elin. The curiousity. This cat is very inquisitive. Always. At this particular moment she smelled my camera and tried to figure out what I was doing. When I did my makeup once she jumped up on the washbasin and tried to touch my mascara with her paw. Wondering what the heck was going on up there?
A similar problem arose when taking this photo. Got one of her eyes in focus.
Tomorrow I will probably watch the movie "12 years a slave". Or "Last Stop Fruitvale Station". We will see!?
"The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it´s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, an no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues"
/Terry Pratchett