“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…”
