My sister Camilla and I were at the beach at about seven on the evening of 8 June 2003, so we stole some snacks from the grownups’ table and took pictures of ourselves making skids in the sand.

Perhaps 0.05 second after hitting the sand. I’m impressed by its shutter speed, but the (digital) camera has an insidious delay of maybe 0.2 second between registering the user’s desire for a picture and actually taking it — this was supposed to be just Camilla’s airborne feet projecting into the frame. When taking pictures of my own jumps, I had to press the button while I was at the top of my parabola. Camilla is pretty clearly wearing shorts here, so I feel pretty silly for giving her some kind of miniskirty thing in the title image.

Sweet, huh? The idea with the style of skidding which Camilla and Peter and I’ve developed is to throw as much sand as possible into the air with the sole of one’s leading foot, then land on the tucked leg for cushioning. This picture is at a slight downward angle; the original ground level was about that of the base of my right pinky toe. If I were to make this skid again, I’d try to rotate a little anticlockwise, to present more of the flat of my foot and to land more on the length of my calf for optimal braking. (This is late in the skid; you can see that the lead foot most be moving slowly by its depth and by its distance from the sand it kicked up, and my tucked leg usually only throws about as much sand as is already in the air here.)

Camilla makes (and enjoys) a particularly pleasing corona. I love pictures of transient things: I don’t think of sand fronts as being real enough to cast long shadows. The picture looks quaintly static, even Camilla.

Thump, thump, thump, thum thump thump thumpthumpthump — whump! Again it looks almost like she’s just balanced there, somehow willing the sand to pop up in front of her.

Peter didn’t go to the beach with us because he had so much homework, but as I was working on this he was goofing off studying beside me, and I figured he deserves an appearance, so here he is.

Camilla had me take another one when she saw how nice the corona was. Why, you may ask, are all these pictures all off-center? Simple: I just never know where Camilla will come down. In the first one above, look where she took off from — the footprints are about a body-length behind her head, so figure about ten feet between there and her foot — and this was quite a short running jump for her; when she tries, she can leap nearly as far as I can, and she doesn’t fall over when she lands unless she wants to. This skid’s jump was higher than usual, onto the densest band of sand nearest the water: you can see how her heel really dug in (just behind her right hand) and her knee shot forward and left. Wham.

Well, that’s why running on sand is so tiring — at least our Washington sand doesn’t squeak. There are tracks here of things who seem to do a lot better.

The next day, we fused sand into glass with fresnel lenses.