Snap Shots: Family fotos can be fun

by Harry Flashman

Unless you are a dyed in the wool ornithologist, it is most likely that the majority of photographs you take are of family members, including the height of difficulty, grandparents, parents and children all in one shot. This week I hope to be able to assist you in getting better pictures, ones that you will want to enlarge and hang on the wall.
For everyone with a bunch of relatives, photographs are the ideal record to show a growing family, from naked on the bunny rug, to first communion, to marriage. Every family has these shots. A source of joy for grandmothers and a source of embarrassment for young teenagers!
To get better shots is not the result of better equipment, a box brownie would be satisfactory, but with today’s digital compacts being the common camera, they will be just fine. What I am talking about here is photographic technique, not the photographic technical details. So make sure there is enough memory on the card and let’s go!
Take the thorny problem of children first. It is my experience that all children are a problem, and photographing them even more so! In fact I actively dislike taking kiddypix, but you have got to take them. The problem comes in the fact that children have an attention span measured in seconds, while teenagers have an attention span that can be measured in nano-seconds, unless they ‘want’ the photograph, whereupon they spend all the time hogging the limelight.
Rule 1 is then to set up the shot you want, before children are brought into it. This does mean you have to ‘see’ the shot you want and then make it happen. Since the child is the important subject, select an area with a blank background. You do not want a cluttered, busy background to take the attention away from the child. Generally, a wall works well, particularly if you position the subject as far away from the background as possible. In this way, even with point and shoot compacts, when you focus on the child, the background will not be in sharp clear focus too. Try for neutral colorings too. A grey wall is better than a white one.
The next most important thing with kids is to get down to their level. You will not get a great shot looking down at them while they squint up to look at you. The camera should not be higher than the subject’s face when taking good kiddypix, so bend at the knees and get down to their level.
Only now, bring on the junior ‘stars’ and start shooting – fast! Move in close so that the head and shoulders fill the frame. Don’t worry if you crop into the hair – just get close. More shots are spoiled by being to far away, rather than the reverse.
Now let’s look at photographing the older members of the family. Grandparents. Nobody wants to see themselves as dried prunes. If Mum and Dad are really getting on a bit, then consider using a soft focus filter to just soften those crows feet just a little. I refuse to use the term ‘laughing lines’ as I believe they are not a laughing matter! And don’t shoot prunes!
So you’ve only got a compact and can’t screw a soft focus filter on – don’t worry, stretch a piece of nylon stocking tightly across the front of the camera and it will work OK. Fortunately, parents do have an attention span that can be measured by standard wrist watches, so you can try placing them in different areas of the garden for different effects. As people getting on in years tend to have white hair, look for darker backgrounds as contrast.
Think too, about getting the older folk to sit down. Comfortable garden chairs are good, but place them together and slightly facing each other. You do not want the “sit up straight” school pictures look with 75 year old grand-parents. And get down to their level too. Move in close, let them fill the frame and see if you haven’t got a great shot out of that afternoon’s photography session.

Dear Hillary,
Further to your reply to ‘Browned Off’ you say that in America they are even drawing up Pre-Nuptial agreements BUT these already exist in Thailand and I advise all Farangs to look beyond the end of their you know what and the bottom of the beer bottle and get a good lawyer to draw one up for them before tying the knot. The first and main clause states that any assets, property, etc., owned by either partner before the marriage remains their individual property in the event of splitting up (divorcing, etc). Other clauses are optional - I had one included that stated that I would never be considered the head of her family, nor liable for any debts, expenses, etc. incurred by any member of this family, nor responsible for housing any of them. This agreement was prepared by my lawyer and signed by us both and witnessed by two Thais. We each have one copy and a third was deposited with the Registrar of marriages. Cost to me was 5,000 baht - a worthwhile investment I am sure you will agree.
A thoughtful Farang
Dear A thoughtful Farang,
Aren’t you the thoughtful one, my Petal. You have been thinking all the way along for ‘Number 1’ and never once could you be considered guilty of a glance of compassion in the direction of your wife’s needs. You may not want to get involved with her family, but I am sure you have involved her in yours, showing off what a beautiful wife you managed to score! Have you never stopped to think that there are cultural and family traditions and responsibilities that your wife has to live up to as well? After all, this country is called Thailand, and the local inhabitants are called Thai. Sounds to me you should have signed off as A Thoughtless Farang! I had always thought that the whole reason for living together was sharing life together, but it seems I have an old fashioned viewpoint, and certainly not one shared by your good self.
Just as an aside, can you read Thai? Any legal document in this country must be written in Thai, or it is worthless. Are you sure that what you think was in the document actually is they way you imagine? English ‘translations’ can be obtained to make the foreigner happy, but the document (in English) has no legal standing. I have also never heard of the Amphur office filing documents for pre-nuptial agreements, but then again, I could be wrong once more.
Dear Hillary,
I have enjoyed reading your column for the past twelve years. Sometimes with laughter and other times with skepticism at how naive some adults appear to be. Surely from the age bracket (40-60 years) of expatriates in Thailand that I have witnessed, one would assume that common sense would come into play.
Many of your articles are written on the so called all-preying bar girl, who somehow always manages to deceive some poor unsuspecting soul out of his very life savings. This intrigues me as to how these mental giants made it to this age bracket in the first place!
Let’s see how this plays out. Man, above age bracket, maybe balding, beer belly, possibly divorced, heard about the young Thai girls and decides this is the place for him! Girl, “Hello Big Sexy Man! Come in, come in! Where are you from! My, what a nice personality (wallet size), buy me a drink!” Now is she to be blamed for his thinking with the little head. Once again common sense!
There are many beautiful ladies in Thailand and I believe that the world has the wrong impression. Most of the women that I have had the pleasure of meeting are looking for “Mr. Right” regardless of age. But in the bars, I think not.
I, like many others both male and female have also been burnt, but not from a Thai lady. I have been happily married to a lady that is nineteen years my junior. We have two adopted children, our home and a successful business. Life started over for me with the help of my Beautiful Thai Lady. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!
Happy in T’land
Dear Happy in T’land,
You have hit the nail on its little head, fair and square, my Petal. Would you go into a bakers shop and expect to find beef steaks? Would you go into a hardware shop and expect to find imported cheeses? Of course not, but the Mr. Wrongs (balding, beer belly, divorced) you describe so well, hang around the beer bars, expecting a well educated, bilingual beauty contest winner, who is waiting just for them, and no other. I’m sorry, but they’ve gone to the wrong shop again. There are many Thai ladies, as you have also said, looking for a Mr. Right, but these Thai ladies aren’t working from a bar stool, saying “Hello sexy man! Come in please!” You are much more likely to find these kind of ladies working in a profession somewhere. I am also glad that life began anew for you, with your own special Thai lady. Best of luck with the lemonade stall, perhaps you could franchise it to some the Mr. Wrongs!

A Female Perspective: Those teenage years

with Sharona Watson

What is it about our little babies that when they reach a certain age, they seem to become self-obsessed and never pay attention to anything but themselves? What happened to my scrumptious little daughter who was always sweetness and light and is suddenly prone to violent swings in temperament and wears a permanent scowl whenever she’s around her parents? I’m not even sure I should be writing this because she’ll be furious when she sees it and she’ll start flapping the newspaper around the room, shouting and screaming at me. Actually, to be fair, she doesn’t shout and scream, rant and rave. She’s kind of quiet but has dark penetrating eyes which often say more than words could ever do.

Teenage angst in action.

Anyway, often when she does say something nowadays it’s just the one syllable, uttered with varying levels of contempt and usually borrowed from the latest useless film about ‘teenage angst’. Whatever the words are, they are more like monkey noises than anything else. ‘Derr!’ is a popular one just now, which can be used it appears, in any situation, at any time and in any place. I take it that I am meant to infer from its use that I am stupid.
‘Er, no!’ is another, which means firstly that I should have realised something was very obvious and secondly, even more blatantly, that she isn’t going to do whatever I asked her.
‘What-ever’ is a ‘Mummy, you’re boring me, I don’t care, so just go away and leave me alone!” response which can be very annoying. I have never liked the ‘I know better than you’ or ‘there’s nothing you can teach me’ attitudes that I see so often in the way that men (sometimes) treat women. The last thing I want to see is that kind of nonsense coming into my house.
On rare occasions, I have even been dealt a straightforward, ‘Oh, will you please just shut up?’ which normally requires some action on my part. I understand what’s going on of course, but I cannot have disrespect being thrown at me. She can be going through all the teenage traumas she wants but there are some things which stay the same. Respect for parents is one of these things.
Having said that, it’s probably best to look on the funny side, even when it can feel exhausting constantly having to deal with teenage troubles. For instance, for certain occasions I will adopt ‘teenage’ language, especially when I know it will embarrass my daughter.
Then there are those plentiful mornings, when a question such as, “What would you like for breakfast, my love?” is met by the snappy response, “Oh, leave me alone!” Then there’s the “What do you want from me?” abruptness when all I have done is ask whether she has everything she needs for school. And when some catastrophe happens like her little sister has borrowed her Barbie’s that she doesn’t use anymore, it’s “Oh My Gosh!” At least she doesn’t blaspheme.
“Good for you” is meant to diminish me when I try to explain that I seem to spend most of my time cleaning up the various belongings which have been scattered around the house. And when she’s too lazy to say one of the above, she just grunts “Uh Huh”.
Other favourite monosyllables are the emphatic “No!” and the almost insolent “So?” I’m relieved that swearing hasn’t crept in yet, although I can’t answer for what happens outside our home; I just hope she has enough self-respect not to use foul language all the time. The “Tut” she has down to a fine art. It’s not quite the teeth-kissing thing that you used to hear in London everywhere, but it can be heard quite a lot in the mornings and evenings especially. “Dunno” is used quite regularly too, a nice way for her to avoid the pain of having to think about something.
The funny thing is that teenagers don’t seem to realize (or are just not interested in the fact) that we were teenagers once as well and actually, it wasn’t that long ago. So I can empathize and I can sympathize and maybe now I’m wondering the same things that my mother thought about, when she was bringing me and my sisters up. I don’t know how my mother managed, with four girls. Actually I do; we all left home of our own volition when we were eleven. But that’s another story. I feel sorrier for my husband’s parents who had four boys. Can you imagine? Five boys including his Dad and typical males besides. Obviously I’ve managed to knock a bit of shape into Andy now, but the stories I hear from his Mum about what he used to get up to! It must have been a nightmare!
I guess it’s something to do with growing up that teenagers start thinking about their parents and probably the whole world in a different way. They start questioning what they are being told as they find the boundaries for themselves. I think this is a very necessary and good part of growing up and if it is looked after carefully, it can really help a person develop. They become more critical, so if you can help them to justify some of their arguments and allow yourself as a parent to be persuaded sometimes, then everyone must be a winner. Teenage years are by no means all bad, of course.
Last year, I was very proud of my daughter when she stood up for her rights as a student in her school. She could have said nothing and the class would have carried on doing nothing, but she didn’t. I thought that was a very mature and strong thing to do; she recognized that it was her right to be educated, she wanted to learn but felt that this was being denied to her. “That’s my girl” I thought. Then, there’s the pleasure of watching my beautiful girl turn into an even more beautiful woman, becoming more and more independent everyday and learning new things all the time about places, people and things. I love her more than I can say.
Next week: I dreamed last night…
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Learn to Live to Learn: Going to the dogs

by Andrew Watson

Over the past few weeks, I have been focusing on what I regard as a fundamental imperative of education in general and international education in particular; to encourage, nurture and develop the capacity in people to ‘act locally, think globally’. One of the problems of extolling some grandiose ideology is putting the rhetoric into practice. Thus, I was delighted and reassured in equal measure recently when I met an individual who puts their passion for caring into practice and by her personal example, illustrates how perhaps we can all live up to lofty idealism.

Toni Hayden – caring for her kittens.
Toni Hayden, from Essex in the UK, is a Year 2 teacher at Garden International School. She became “fed up” with seeing stray dogs with suppurating open wounds of pus and blood, scratching their skin off, sometimes starving and getting hit by cars in and around Ban Chang, where she lives. “It breaks my heart,” she revealed. So what did she do? She did something about it. Instead of whingeing about a problem, she went in search of a solution.
“Somebody told me about ‘Soi Dog Rescue’ in Bangkok (www.soidogrescue.org) so I wrote to Sheridan Conisbee (president and co-founder) and asked if they could come and help out down here. But they were just way too busy. They’ve got thousands and thousands of dogs to deal with in Bangkok.” But they gave Toni hope, encouragement and contacts, “It was clear that there were quite a few other people who had written to her from around here saying the same kind of thing.” Some of those people were part of another organisation called ‘Dog Chance’, founded by Khun Pym <www.dogchance.com>. It was an ideal opportunity to pool resources and ideas.
Toni’s persuasive, gentle compassionate enthusiasm was reminding me of something I had read recently by Abraham Maslow, management guru and the ‘Father of Third Force Psychology’ (also known as ‘humanist psychology’), a philosophy to help recognize and develop the human capacity for compassion, creativity, ethics, love, spirituality, and other uniquely human traits.
With boundless enthusiasm and despite being somewhat limited by the hours of the school day, Toni joined up with ‘Dog Chance’ and the Navy at the Naval base in Sattahip where they have built a Dog rescue centre. Vets and volunteers from Bangkok to Rayong came together for a session of mass neutering; 100 dogs in a weekend. That’s a lot of scissors. Whilst the vets did the cutting, Toni and the other volunteers looked after pre-op and post-op care, which included dressing the dogs’ wounds; real hands on stuff.
How had the dogs come to be at the centre in the first place? I thought. I mean, it’s not like you can just put a sign up, is it? “The Navy had to drive around the day before to catch them,” explained Toni patiently. “Like humans, the dogs must not have eaten for twelve hours before the operation.” It became obvious that there’s a whole logistical aspect to collecting the dogs, caring for them and “getting to know them” before they are neutered.
There are obvious dangers. How did Toni feel about dealing with mange ridden dogs and possibly rabies? “My biggest worry was catching Mange.” (You can do that?) Mange (from the French) is a skin disease in hairy and woolly animals, caused by a parasitic mite which lives under the skin. (yuk!) Toni described it as ‘really contagious’ although I read elsewhere that it is only occasionally communicated to humans. On the other hand, I suppose the more contact you have with mangy dogs, the more likely “the dog version of scabies” will burrow under your skin. Happily, it’s treatable.
What about rabies? Has she been vaccinated? “Er, no.” she says sheepishly. “I should have but I don’t like needles. I think most of the volunteers would have had the injection. But you can get an injection up to twenty four hours after being bitten.” Rather courageously, this doesn’t prevent Toni from vaccinating dogs against rabies. “I ‘scrub up’ and I ‘scrub down’.” I’ve got a little bunny rabbit at home so I am terrified that I’m going to give something to her. I was thinking “Oh dear. A combination platter; myxomatosis, rabies and mange. Tremendous.” My squeamishness wouldn’t have been tolerated by Toni, so I kept quiet. Actually, I was learning a great deal from her, about courage and devotion in particular.
Nonetheless, “It was a bit of a baptism of fire for me,” Toni admits. “I learned so much. I was showed how to muzzle - you can’t muzzle them until you’ve got a lead on (I had visions of a lasso) – then you have to befriend them. “The dogs were really friendly up until the moment they were to be injected.” Now the dogs have been neutered, Toni wants to see if she can get the dogs adopted. Understandably, space is at a premium at the rescue centre and there’s a need to establish some kind of turnover.
Bringing the concept of care for animals to the school has been a natural progression for Toni; she started an after-school club to that end. It’s perfect ‘CAS’ material. “But I had way more volunteers than I could take. However, in the long run I would definitely like to get more and more students involved.”
One day she found a box of kittens less than two weeks old that someone had abandoned. With a heart like Toni’s, she couldn’t just leave them alone. Cynics might ask, “Why bother with the cats and dogs?” Toni’s answer is immediate, “I can’t bear to see the suffering - living in pain.” She is a passionate believer in the role of education in helping people to change their view of sterilisation. It’s a ‘no brainer’ of course. The more dogs that are neutered, the less dogs we’ll have around and the greater the chances of them being healthy. It may be a dog’s life, but Toni Hayden really cares.
Next week: Maslow- the man’s a genius
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Toni Hayden and friends; care in the community.