When Holly and I started dating, she said she liked how I looked with the goatee really well, so I decided to keep my goatee until a day FAR in the future. Little did I know that today would be the day to get a clean shave.
Kyle Fossman organized a beard growing competition with two teams: he and I on team A, and the two science teachers, Mark Fontenot and Carson Buck, on team B. We all started with a clean shave on Thursday morning and will all shave with an electric shaver at school on Friday after a week and a day of beard growth. Each person’s beard mass will be measured and the team with the greatest total beard mass will win the competition and the losing team will cook them a steak dinner at Mr. Fontenot’s house.
I have to admit, that shaving off a beard I’ve had for about nine years was a very strange, almost surreal, experience. As the goatee came off, here came my chin, which I hadn’t seen in quite a long time. I couldn’t decide if I looked younger or older, fatter, or skinnier, or what. As I looked in the mirror, the person I was most reminded of was Jack. I thought, “Hmm. I look like Jack now.” You be the judge.
Not feeling at all confident in my new look, I asked Mark Daniel, who’s now in Kindergarten and has never seen me without a beard,” what he thought when he woke up that morning and we were going through our morning routine, he smiled up at me really big and said, “Weird,” then continued to smile.
I asked him, “Do you think I look younger or older?”
He said, “Younger.”
I asked, “Do you know what happened?
He said, “You got shaved.”
Holly didn’t really know what to say at first, “Is that you? You look really different. Are you still the same?”
The kids at school were quite surprised by how I look, as most of them probably haven’t seen me without a beard in their memory.
In about a week, I’ll be looking roughly the same as I did before the shave, I suppose.
But then I’ll have to shave again.
Concerning the WB in the two photos, they were shot with different cameras and the second one did not have the same picture style selected. I suppose I’ll try to fix the clean shaven shot to match the other one if I can read up on it and figure out how to do that. For the first round of shots, I shot in JPEG fine, with WB set to “flash” or “strobe” since that’s what we’re using, and I was using my own camera. For the second round of pictures, I borrowed Ron’s 40D and we shot most of the pictures in RAW then converted them over to jpegs using ACDSee’s Raw converter, but then we ran out of card space, and started shooting in JPEG and I guess he had the color preference set differently. I like nice consumer type pounchy colors right out of the camera, so I have mine set to high color saturation. Since the second picture was so bland, I tried a quick attempt at fixing it in CS2, but don’t really like the result.
Filed under: Canon, Family Stories, Photography | 5 Comments »
Matt's Weblog 