“Jandro wants to come with me on my workshop to the Galapagos Islands later this summer, but his mother says it will interrupt his tutoring schedule. She’s trying to get him ready to do testing so he can apply to private schools for high school next year. He thinks I can talk her into letting him go, but I try not to get between them in fights.”
“Makes sense.”
“Paola thinks his whole future is on the line, which doesn’t help because he has test anxiety. And I want him to do well, but I hate how intense she gets about it.” Ren sighed and rubbed his face. “I just think it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he comes on that trip with me. But I can’t admit that to him without starting a fight with her.”
She nodded. “Agreeing on how to raise kids is hard even when you’re married,” she said. “Anya’s always getting into disagreements with Jeremy about Ilona, and they’re both pretty easygoing. Paola always seemed…” Sarah stopped herself.
“She wants what she wants,” he filled in. “Like a freight train that you can climb aboard or get out of the way. Anyway, I was going to stop over in Toronto on my way home from this workshop, so I’m going to see if I can get her to bring him up and I can spend a weekend there with Jandro instead, so he still gets a fun trip this summer. He could spend a day or two and visit some universities in Toronto with me. Paola wants to inspire him to get excited about college.”
“How often do you come to Toronto?” The thought hurt a little. Had he been passing through town often without telling her?
He gave her a quick look. “I usually make it up once a year or so.”
She nodded. “Right. Well, it’s your turn for music.” She tried for a casual smile. “I want to see if you’re listening to the same stuff you were listening to in Las Vegas.”
“What was I listening to? I don’t even remember. I remember we listened to that Lord Huron song.”
“It was a lot of male singer-songwriters who were deep in their feelings.”
Ren connected his phone to the rental car and put on a playlist. “Here’s my current favorites. You can tell me whether my taste has changed.” The songs now were by Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Cave.
“Huh,” she said as she looked through the list. “Now it’s all men who are disappointed with humanity.”
Ren gave a little laugh. “Probably accurate. Right after my divorce, I was sad, but I wasn’t angry yet.”
“When did you get angry?”
He looked at her for a long moment. “So can I explain what happened? That night?”
Sarah hesitated, then shook her head. “No. Not yet. We’re getting along right now, and we have to work together this week. I don’t want to fight.”
He took another long breath and released it. “Okay. Not yet.”
Sarah felt like a coward. Along stretch of highway opened ahead of them and Leonard Cohen muttered in their ears about the darkness of modern society.
“So you promised to talk me through the basics of shooting the stars,” she said at last.
“Sure,” he said. He looked at the road. “You know a lot of this already, but the basic problem with night photography is setting your exposure and shutter speed, right? If you set your exposure correctly for the stars…”
“Then the foreground is too dark,” Sarah filled in.
“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.”
