11. Sunday #4
“If you set it for the foreground, the stars look fuzzy and blown out. And if you do a long exposure, let’s say you do a three-minute shot with your shutter open so that enough light will hit your sensor to show the foreground, then you get star trails.
The stars are constantly moving in the sky, circling around the North Star, right?
And sometimes you want star trails. But if you want pinprick stars, you have to do something else.
So there are a couple of solutions I use.
One is to add light to the foreground, to paint it with flashlights while your shutter is open, so you can keep your exposure short enough so you don’t get star trails. ”
“Light painting. You never use a flash?”
He looked disgusted. “Ugh, never. Flashes have no nuance. They make the scene look flat.”
“I like that sometimes,” Sarah said.
“You use flash for that throwback 1970s paparazzi thing. Not the same at all,” Ren said, and she felt briefly gratified at how well he remembered her work. “On shoots, I prefer painting with flashlights to give objects definition. And the other option is to do a photo composite.”
“So you take one shot exposed for the stars and another for the foreground?”
“And combine them in photo editing. Some people go overboard with that, though. There are photographers who will make the moon look giant, or use stars from one location combined with mountains from another. I don’t believe in that.
To me, it’s morally wrong to use the same stars for multiple shots.
A photo should record exactly what stars and constellations were in the sky on the night that you took the picture, even if you’re taking multiple shots to create the image. ”
“There’s your journalism background,” Sarah said. “You think photo editing is unethical.”
He smiled at her. “I do realize you built your career on photo editing.”
“Believe me, if I could have gotten those babies to climb the ridge of a barn by themselves, I would have done it.”
Ren chuckled. “Anyway, every workshop I teach, it’s half about teaching folks to get proper exposure, showing them light painting, and half about how to do post-processing to make their photos look good. A lot of Milky Way stuff needs you to push the saturation so you can see the colors.”
“So you mostly shoot digital?”
“I prefer to shoot on my Hassy, but a lot of the time on workshops, I shoot digital because—”
“Did you just call your Hasselblad camera your Hassy?”
Ren looked embarrassed. “That’s not a—”
“Oh yes, it is. It’s like calling a BMW your Beemer. ‘Hold on. Gotta pull out my Hassy for this shot.’ Still so pretentious.”
“No, if I were being pretentious I would explain that my vintage Hasselblad 501cm was picked up at an estate sale and reportedly owned by Frank Sinatra.”
“Are you serious? I hate you.”
“He loved cameras, Ol’ Blue Eyes.”
“Why is your life so much cooler than mine?”
Ren frowned. “It’s definitely not.”
“So are you in Vegas for good, then?”
“It’s tricky to say,” he replied. “I mentioned Jandro is applying to high schools. So depending on whether he goes away for school next year…that changes things. A year from now, I wouldn’t necessarily have to be there.”
“But you escape pretty often.”
“I get time off for good behavior.”
She considered his life for a moment. He had been all over the world. She was excited that she’d been to Paris a couple of times. “And why Newfoundland? Aren’t there places in the Rockies where you can shoot? Especially if your clients are from Silicon Valley?”
Ren smiled. “It’s all about exclusivity with these guys.
The tech guys who sign up for my workshops could create any photo they want in A.I.
, right? But that’s not what they want to do.
They want to be able to put a shot up on their wall and say, ‘I took that photo up in Newfoundland,’ in some park that their friends from Palo Alto have never been to.
Or Easter Island. Or Finland. The reason we’re doing Gros Morne is because none of the guys who sign up for my workshops have been there yet.
So it’s pretty, but it’s also about taking the photos that nobody else has. ”
Sarah smiled. “I had no idea I grew up somewhere so exclusive.”
“Newfoundland will really be on the map when some tech billionaire decides to buy up land to build his post-apocalyptic compound.”
“If that happens, I’m blaming you personally.”
Ren considered the road ahead. “Some of the folks in my workshops are great. But it’s like any other service job. I have to keep the clients happy.”
It was fascinating to see Ren—intellectual Ren, who loved to critique capitalism back in school—talking about the realities of keeping a small business running. Of course he had grown up in the last twenty years, but he had grown into someone who seemed mature and practical.
Though maybe he was not that mature about women. That part of his life remained a mystery to her.
Sarah’s cell phone rang and she picked it up. She knew the number. She had left a message for her manager Owen that morning to say that she had to take the week off, expecting to hear from him Monday, but he apparently checked his messages over the weekend, because of course he did.
Owen wouldn’t spend his weekends hiking with friends or catching up on old movies; he would wake up and instantly respond to work emails with phone calls, because he was the worst person on earth.
“Sarah,” Owen began immediately, “you know you can’t just take off any amount of time you want. You have limited vacation time.”
“I know that. It’s a family emergency.” Sarah felt Ren’s eyes on her as she spoke.
“This kind of thing is cause for termination, as you should be aware,” Owen said.
“I understand. I certainly won’t make a habit of it. If you need me to recommend a freelance photographer for the week…”
“The whole point of having an in-house marketing team is that we don’t have to hire freelancers.
” She hated him with a fiery passion at that moment.
It wasn’t just his smug tone. It was the timing of it: a Sunday at noon, because dressing her down couldn’t possibly wait until Monday morning.
No, he needed to act fast to drag her away from whatever she was doing and back to her desk by Monday…
not because he needed her, because Sarah knew that absolutely nothing critical or time sensitive would be occurring this week, but for the principle of the thing.
Just to show that he could force her to obey.
“I know that,” she said with forced politeness.
“If we hire freelancers, we don’t need you.”
“I know.”
Owen sighed bitterly. “I’ll speak to people, but I don’t think this is getting approved.”
“Thank you. I understand.”
She wondered if she was about to be fired, and as she hung up the phone, she waited for panic to set in.
But it didn’t.
Why wasn’t she panicking?
She was going to lose her job.
She should be freaking out. And she felt…fine.
She stared out the window, letting the strange dissonance of her reaction sink in. She must really hate her job. She had never articulated it that way to herself, but if she had liked it even a little bit, she wouldn’t be feeling this complete, Zen-like calm about possibly losing it.
Ren glanced over at her. “Trouble at work?”
“It’s fine.”
“I didn’t mean to cause problems for you.”
Sarah almost laughed. Ren always seemed to cause problems for her, one way or another. But she didn’t feel angry at Ren right then, either.
The next few hours passed in a strange mix of feelings.
Sometimes, Sarah felt the uncomplicated boredom of long car trips: none of the trees were very tall nor the houses very large.
Her home province rolled past them in its epic loneliness, always beautiful, often poor, the roads practically empty except for occasional trucks passing them a little too aggressively.
Other times, Sarah felt a delirious sense of unreality at sitting next to Ren again, like he couldn’t possibly be here, and they couldn’t possibly be chatting about movies and the best places he had travelled and the weirdest clients she had dealt with during her Existential Innocence series.
It felt strange that they could still make each other laugh.
They could still talk for forty-five minutes about books they had loved and movies they had seen.
When they sat across from each other at a tiny restaurant for lunch, ordering milk shakes and eating fries, she felt like she was in a strange dream.
Occasionally, she remembered that she was still mad at him.
He had hurt her and probably would again.
He was too easy to fall for—that was the problem.
It wasn’t just his looks or intelligence.
It was the way he seemed to know her so well, the way he remembered stories she had told him when she was twenty years old.
“That was when you were taking care of Anya’s cat,” he would say in the middle of her reminiscing about getting locked out of her Montreal apartment.
Or: “This was the owner of the Kristman Gallery?” when she talked about an annoying comment at one of her shows.
Or: “Ah yes, your Agnes Varda period,” when she talked about an unfortunate haircut she got during her third year at McGill. It was irritating every time he did it.
She had sworn off romance for a reason. The whole point of putting your heart out of reach was that it couldn’t get broken.
It belonged to you again, not to the whims of people who came into and out of your life without warning.
Maybe her mother had been right to stay single.
Feelings were like a roller coaster ride: they were exciting and terrifying, but they always ended up with you at the bottom of the ride—never at the top, never at the high point.
The high points were temporary. The low points were where you landed.