Food for thought, belly and eye.

Not the most delightful morning to get out of your warm bed and head over to the physical therapists office for a little guidance on how to use a shoulder. Rain, ominous grey clouds and a temperature to freeze the salt out off them nuts all contributed to my dismay.

But still, after the initial shock of the discovery that Finland just might not be designed for human life, I got up and headed out.

It´s a weird feeling when you´re 25 years old and a medical professional tells you that you should learn to use your limb. I mean, I have been using it with great success for a multitude of things for almost all of my life. Apparently my joints are too loose and all of the really important small muscles in my body (which hold those joints firmly in place) are not in the shape they should be. So now I have to train them vigorously almost every day. This training consists of extremely small and seemingly very easy motions targetting only the tiniest muscles. To anyone watching, it might look like I am hardly doing anything at all, but man does it make my arm shake!

How does this relate to photography in the least? Well, actually it does! Recently I have been shooting under constant pain. The whole reason for this healing program is that recently the pain has forced me to do some stupid things like leave stuff home when I could have needed it or finishing early when I could have aimed for higher goals and at the worst, not shooting at all even though I would have had the chance.

After todays therapy session, I was feeling much better about my chances of actually dealing with this thing myself and not having to resort to surgery or anything like that, so I said to myself: "Niko, reward yourself with food!". Sadly, I kind of forgot to shop for ingredients, so as usual, I had to wing it. I thought the result looked pretty nifty, so I took some pictures with a very simple setup. Just one light and umbrella on the opposite side from camera. It´s a very useful and fast/easy setup to grab a food photo.These shots are kind of halfway done, because my food styling skills are very limited. The rucola looked plain horrible to the naked eye, but it will do for these frames. 

I then stripped the umbrella from the light, because I wanted the soup to glisten a bit. So now it´s just a bare flash on the opposite side of camera, and some ambient coming from the same direction from a window. I thought the third frame actually looked quite good and not as traditional as the previous frames.

And here´s a boring filler image for your fill-viewing pleasure:

Now that the day is almost over, it´s time to ponder about the clear signs of how short life is (failing joints @ 25) and make a decision to actually do something useful first thing tomorrow.