Love in Later Life

Following success upon submitting a photo to The Guardian newspaper, an opportunity to contribute to a theme of Later Life Love was too good to miss this close to Valentine’s Day. I had an interesting story to tell about findings on this very topic from a graduate thesis I supervised last year. What the piece needed, however, was a romantic photo.

So yesterday afternoon, Lee, me, and Sammy our dog went to a snowfield to shoot a heartwarming picture on a freezing day. We took a chair for me to sit on because of our difference in height. The camera was an early model from the Nikon 1 series that I’d bought for a song at a drugstore and wanted to try out. I put it on a tripod with a 10 sec. shooting delay. Getting from camera to chair needed a 5-sec. dash though snow at a pace a sprinter would feel no shame about.

When I’d reach the chair, another problem arose. Trying to conjure up romantic gazes into each other’s eyes, in the remaining 5 seconds, is not easy when your fingers are frozen. You can see from the photo that laughter always won out over romance. Sammy was right to look bemused at these weird antics by her humans. The whole experience was a hoot.

The photo plus story got to The Guardian late last night. They were online this morning. If you’re interested in findings that dispel myths about love in later life, you can read about them here

Cheers, Mike

I thought at first you made an amazing chance find while ice fishing! Well Michael, you actually planned and delivered this vision and the laughter made it look much more alive and fresh.







So this is where interpretation is deceiving because, I'd have never guessed to had just sprinted from your camera and were trying not to laugh in the ensuing 5 seconds! So much for visual accuracy. But our brains are also quite used to and tolerant of deception and our masks that hide true feelings. In fact, we expect it of people socially! So we don't talk about the things that are really on our minds when we meet the couple and the man says, "Meet Janice, my fashion coach, when we all know otherwise". So we expect and tolerate false faces as part of the "social contract" of meeting in public and not dealing with "laundry" - dirty or otherwise.

The elderly in retirements homes in Florida, OTOH, have romances that must survive harsh public critique and one might, overhear at the card table, "Don't believe his charm, Betsy, he has no money and can't get it up!"

Asher

Hi, Mike,

Oh, that is just exquisite on many fronts.

Thank you so much.

Best regards,

Doug

BTW, did you darken the sky or do you have some backlighting from the snow or something else?