Just showing my age ..

I awoke this morning to hear of the sad and premature death of poor old former Liberal leader Charles Kennedy. Fifty-five, people are saying, so young! Old. Premature. Young. Don't we have such defined views on age? I photographed a .. here we go .. young (21!) lady in the studio recently who warned me not to photograph "her wrinkles" and, any other day of the week, we'd complain that, at 55, we're 'getting on a bit' but should that person pop it then all we hear is that they were 'too young' to die. I know, it's all comparative and I'm rambling on a bit but I'd already got an 'age' niggle in my head before I even heard the sad news this morning ..

Cake smashes! That's what was bothering me. This (American) idea of sitting a one-year old child in front of a birthday cake and encouraging it to smash the sh*t out of it, all in the name of 'cute' photographs. If you'd read yesterday's blog you may have sensed my unease at the thought of having to shoot a cake-smash that afternoon, but I just can't believe we'd encourage a child to do such wilful damage to anything! Capturing a child if it did cheekily pinch a bit of cake is one thing, but making them do it is a different matter altogether! As it was, yesterday's little baby wouldn't go near the cake. Thankfully, he couldn't grasp the concept that we all wanted him to trash a perfectly good cake and so the shots simply show him sitting by the side of it with a little (added!) icing on his face.

However - and I can hear you all now - I am running a photographic studio and the customer is always right so forgive me going on so. I think I'm just showing my age ..