Old Camera, New Pictures

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been taking some shots with the old camera and will continue to use it until the insurance company comes through and we can get back to all the lovely goodness of a new camera again.

First, a couple of little unedited movies you can download while you browse: the first is Come Here, Fish, in which Molli Malou’s questionable fishing tactics are displayed, and the second is Bobby the Inchworm, in which you’ll have a chance to see the pet inchworm Molli Malou adopted (and baptized Bobby) yesterday. (At the end of the second video, Molli Malou is giggling and reprimanding Bobby for trying to climb up her sleeve, and is saying in Danish, “Don’t do that, Bobby! You mustn’t do that!”

First, just a random cute shot of our subject riding her old trike over at Mormor & Jørgen’s.

Then we skip ahead to an evening of face-painting at home.

Yeah, I’m really not kidding about that camera, although in this case I think it actually made for a nice picture. The next shot is clearer, but not as nice.

And yet the pictures do come through nicely sometimes—it’s really a problem of the camera being moody, difficult, and unreliable, so that we lose certain special moments to its capricious temperament. Other times, like a quiet evening of bubble blowing, it works beautifully.

The rest of the shots are from the annual Kammer family picnic, this year held at Klaus’s place outside the city instead of the usual picnic in Frederiksberg Garden. Molli Malou looks great in her new blue windbreaker.

Trine had bought her a fishing net a few days previously, and Molli Malou had been aching to use it ever since. We kept telling her she could fish in Uncle Klaus’s pond, so to her the whole day was about fishing.

Okay, we’ve finally eaten and off she goes and—

See what we live with? Like one in three pictures comes out like that. You have to bang the camera against your palm or some other firm but not lethally hard surface until the display flickers back to life.

So here we go a-fishing. . .

We obviously didn’t catch anything (in the last picture she was shouting at the ducks to “Come here!”, but they weren’t any more gullible than the fish).

At this point she took possession of the camera and took a lot of pictures of what I assumed was nothing at all until I got home and saw them on the computer screen. She was shooting a duck that had blended so well into the scenery I hadn’t even noticed it!

After we gave up on fish and ducks Molli Malou was still persuaded we could find frogs, snakes, or tigers in the woods, so off we traipsed. I adore this next picture, and it never could have come to be without the vaseline-smeared lens effect that the lousy camera sometimes imposes, made even softer by the weird Scandinavian evening light. (I forget what time it is in this picture, but the light really is different here in these late spring and early summer evenings.)

We all wanted a bonfire but nobody wanted to cut up kindling, so we made Molli Malou do it. (You’ll notice that’s Mormor helping her with a saw. I suddenly recollect Mormor was the first relative to introduce Molli Malou to knives, too, on a trip to Tivoli last year at about this time. Pattern?)

Here are Mormor and granddaughter looking for some fish.

And here’s Molli Malou with her friend Bobby the Inchworm.

And taking a little sailing tour with Daddy (she loved paddling around the little pond, and actually seemed to grasp the concept of rowing on our second trip, a little later in the evening.)

It was a lovely bonfire:

We played a lot of badminton toward the end of the evening, and Molli Malou was very eager to play.

And that’s that.

We went to CopenhagenActive with John and Liam this morning, and John has already send me a video that I’ll upload and post later today or this week (it’s about 20MB). It was a lot of fun and Molli Malou and Liam had a blast. (It’s basically a fitness expo, with a lot of different health and fitness product and service vendors displaying their wares. The “health and energy” drink booth was offering free samples of a familiar American product with some fanfare: alongside some bottled natural fruit smoothies, Gatorade, and the like, were cases and cases of, “New in Denmark!” — Mountain Dew! Ah, yes, the health drink of champions! They also had eight or ten Wii stations set up and John, Trine, and I had a blast boxing each other bloody. I think John is actually on his way to buy a Wii as I write this.)

Anyway, like I said, that’s that.