Do you like taking pictures? Do you like having your picture taken?
My answer:
Well, being blind, I definitely don’t have much experience with taking pictures. 😀 NOnetheless I still have some. If you don’t know yet, I am totally blind and since birth and don’t have light perception, I don’t know many individuals like me, because most blind people I know have at least light perception or some partial vision, or if they don’t see the light they usually have eye prostheses or some mechanical eye damage, while my condition is more neurological than ophtalmological and more brain- than eye-related. I mention this because while partially sighted people or even those having just light perception have it a little bit easier to take pictures, in my case it can be actually only guessing if I’m doing it right or not, usually it’s not. 😀
After two years when I was going to the integration school, I came back to the boarding school where I started my education, but although my Mum has been very conservative and didn’t like the idea of children having their own phones as early as possible, this time she bought me a phone so maybe it would be easier for me to cope if I’ll be able to contact her more often and not just wait for her to call our group phone. And as it was my first phone I started to learn how it works overall and one of things i discovered was that it has pretty good camera and that technically it’s easy to take photos with it. It kind of fascinated me, I somehow wouldn’t thought it’s that easy – you know, apart of that you need to first see the object you want to take a picture of 😀 – and I was experimenting with it a lot. I was taking pictures of random stuff and asking people to review them. And, actually, some of them were apparently pretty good and clear. 😀 Like I did Zofijka’s picture(she was about 3 then) and it wasn’t that bad, and some more photos. Then at school I also experimented a bit just for fun and those more clear and good pictures I did were of my roommate’s guitar, my figurines on the cupboard and my roommate’s head and people were making laugh of them. 😀 I even think I still have them somewhere 😀 but I don’t storage them for purpose, I just never cared to remove them. But I got bored rather quickly of it, as I couldn’t see the results of my creativeness so it started to be a bit pointless.
ANother experience with taking pictures I’ve had was with scanning books with OCR. And omg this is a nightmare! I bought myself a scanner a few years ago, to scan books that I can’t get anywhere in an accessible form. But it turned out that its efficiency is much more dependent on things like lighting in the room. Of course I can’t control it on my own, plus the room I lived in then was rather dark and there wasn’t much space in it, so even for a sighted person I guess it would be a little bit of a deal. To scan a book with this thing you need to place it on a piece of paper under the scanner, it can’t go outside of it, otherwise you’d have plenty of mistakes in the text and the scan would be shitty, which would be the more crappy if you were – like me – scanning books in foreign languages in which you aren’t that much fluent, guessing what should be written in it isn’t that easy when your vocabulary is rather limited. That was also sometimes an issue for me, the more if a book was bigger, especially that you couldn’t move it almost at all while scanning, which seemed a bit impossible for me, because well you need to turn pages somehow. Then there was another issue – you had to turn the page at a certain time, if you wouldn’t fit in it, it would go badly in the scan. Considering the fact how often pages of a book tend to stick to each other, sometimes you would not manage on time, especially if you have coordination issues and shouldn’t move the book. I had to stand or kneel in front of the scanner and scan one page after another, and it was impossible to pause it once you started to scan the book, ’cause then you wouldn’t be able to put it as a whole. Because I tend to have very low blood pressure all the time, I get dizzy and faint easily while standing or kneeling for a long time, so usually I just couldn’t resist and had to sit somewhere near it. But it changed the lighting, actually any move you’d make could change the lighting, I guess, and it influenced the quality of the text. Sometimes my Mum would help me but she was saying it’s too laborious for her and that I actually would do better if I’d rewrite the book for myself. 😀
So yeah that made me hate taking pictures. I still have that scanner, and still have lots of books, especially in Swedish, that I need to scan, and I live in another house and in different room, and my Dad promises me he’ll make a tripod for me so the book will be more stable and easier to operate for me, plus the lighting here is better, but I still haven’t dare to take it out and scan something, it was so horrid. 😀 But I’ll have to, maybe after my finals.
As for having my picture taken… grrrrrr!!! I hate it, it annoys me so much, I don’t know why. Well, at least usually. Dunno, people say I’m photogenic bla bla bla, so I don’t think it’s about how I look, I just feel so… weird, well I don’t know how to put it, but I simply don’t like it when people take my picture. When I was very little I was on some silly casting and I had a whole session, guys, I thought they’ll drive me crazy. Of course I didn’t tell anyone about how I was feeling, and my Mum was saying afterwards that I was actually too calm and that I should be more expressive on those pictures, but I remember it clearLy that I felt like I’m going to start to scream any minute if they won’t let me go soon and if I’d try to be expressive, it all would surely burst out of me. Plus it was just boring, standing there like some damn figurine and smiling at God knows what and why. That’s my opinion about having my pictures taken, sorry people, I’m not Misha, he is a real model. It’s probably related to my “sky-high” self-esteem, although like I said my looks aren’t a thing I’m really very concerned about, there are many other things I don’t like about myself much more.
SO how is it with you? 🙂
My Inner MishMash 