Changing of the Guard
(a parable)
by Joseph Cover
Originally published Moon City Review 6.2
He noticed her when she came in with her friends. Perhaps it was her smile, or the way she laughed, loudly, but not offensively. Still there was no reason he should notice her. He had grandchildren her age; besides, he was not looking for a woman.
How many times did she catch him looking at her? Three at least. He reasoned that he must stop or she would think him a dirty old man, and that wasn’t something he wanted anyone to think. He stole one more glance. Only that time, she was already looking at him. She began to make her way across the room towards his stool at the end of the highly polished cherry wood bar. “Do you know me?” she quizzed.
“No, no,” he quietly answered staring into the glass held by the fingertips of his large hands.
Smiling, she replied, “Payment for staring at me, then, is you have to buy me a drink.”
She must be a whore, he thought. A professional whore. One who does it for money, because no casual whore, only looking for a little fun, would waste her time on an old man. Then he looked into her eyes, and he knew he had been mistaken—she was not a prostitute. He had photographed enough hookers to know. Her eyes were neither hungry, nor hollow. With a trained eye he observed her face. The pores of her skin were tight. The light from behind the counter struck her left side, the illumination accented the outline of her face. Her forehead was too high, too much flesh on her cheeks, and her hair was too clean. If her hair were dirty, hanging in strands, then she would make an interesting print. But not now. She was too clean.
“All right, I’ll buy you a drink, but only if you join me while you drink it,” he said.
Motioning to the occupied seat next to his, she stated. “You’ll have to join me and my friends at our table.”
Glancing at her friends, seeing them at their table, he was certain they didn’t want a grandfather joining them, and, even if they did, he had long ago lost the energy for riotous laughter and grandiose behavior. “No, it’s all right. I’ll buy you a drink, but I’ll stay here.”
Shaking her head, she negotiated, “We will take a table of our own.”
Looking around the bar, she pointed towards the front of the room. “Over there by the window. We can watch the world pass by. And if my friends want to join us, then they can.”
“And what will you and I talk about over there by the window?” he said laughing.
Her thin lips curled into an impish grin as she placed her delicate hand on his grizzled paw and replied, “Negatives. And positives. We will talk about Ilford and Fuji, kodachrome, 35 millimeter, 120, and glass plates.” She was giggling as she revealed, “I know you. I’ve followed your work since I was in high school.” Lowering her voice she shared, “It was you who inspired me. I am also a photographer.
“My parents took me to your shows at local galleries. My father always said you were a great photographer. ‘Too good for this town’ is how he would put it, and now I want to shoot like you. My favorite print is the children playing in the ruins. But I also love the street people, derelicts in the bars, the homeless digging through dumpsters. I want to capture the streets on film.”
The old man stood from his stool, gently took her hand, and said, “Then let’s go sit by the window and talk about film if you like.” Letting go of her hand, he spoke to the bartender, “Bring this lady whatever she wants.”
In answer to the bartender’s gaze she said, “A rum and Coke.” He nodded and turned to the bottles lining the wall behind him.
They strolled to a small round table located next to a plate glass window, and motioning for her to sit, he pulled out a wooden chair situated so that her right side was to the window and her back towards the bar. He took the seat opposite her, placing himself with his back into the corner, where the crumbling red brick wall joined the silver metal frame supporting the glass. He pulled his sweater closer around himself to ward off the slight chill coming in through the window, and noticed that she seemed unfazed by the late October air.
He asked, “What’s your name?”
“Jill. Jill Webb,” she replied. “And you are Mr. Parker.”
He nodded. “Jerome. Call me Jerome. So Jill, you’re a photographer?”
“Yes. That is, I’m going to be one. I’m a student at the art institute. I have my show at the end of next semester.”
“That’s very good,” he noted while paying the bartender for her drink.
“Not all that good,” she responded. “Everyone gets a show. It's a requirement for graduation. It will be good if I make my professors happy.”
“Of course.”
“Actually, I have a small show right now at the coffee shop down the street”
“Oh yeah? Tell me about it.”
Slouching lower into her chair, she stated, “It’s not much really. I work there, so the manager lets me hang some photos.” Then sitting erect she said, “But what I wanted to ask you is why did you close your studio?”
“Old age mainly. At 72 going to work has become a bore, and the cold winters are getting to me. I’ve bought a small place near my son in Florida, to be near family.”
“What part? We used to vacation on the gulf. Destin. The white sands of the miracle mile,” she exclaimed tossing her hands up as if throwing sand into the air.
“St. Augustine.”
She smiled knowingly. “Ah yes. A lovely place for photography.”
“None of that. I’m retiring. Everything in my shop is going to be auctioned off this week. You should come. Be plenty of good deals there,” he commented with a wink.
“Maybe I will,” she answered. “Just maybe I will. But, you’ll have to take a camera to Florida. It’s almost a federal law. You can’t go to Florida without a camera.”
“I’ll keep my Contax rangefinder. I got it in Dresden near the end of the war. My unit came into the city following the bombings in ‘45. We were supposed to clean out the enemy and rescue the Allied troops imprisoned there. When we swept through the remains of the Contax factory, I took a camera and two lenses as souvenirs. That was the first camera I ever owned. No electronics. No digital images. No light meter.” Holding his right hand out as if he were panhandling, he added, “If I had known at the time what a light meter was, I would have looked for a body with one.” Shaking his head with a smile, then gently slapping his cheek with his palm, he stated, “But I didn’t know.”
Raising his glass, he took a sip and pursed his lips. “I took that camera and two lenses. I didn’t know how to use it, so from my first roll of film I only got three good images. One of the photos you mentioned—the children in the rubble—I took that at Dresden with that first roll of film. When it was all said and done, the Russians got the factories, and the United States got the scientists that worked in them.”
A momentary silence was broken when she observed, “That camera is fifty-four years old. That's older than my father. Does it still work?”
“As good as new. It’s never had any work done on it, but the lenses fog, so I have to get them cleaned occasionally, but the Zeiss optics are perfect. Of course it takes longer to get the settings right than on the newer cameras, but that forces you to create the photograph. There is no throwing the camera to your eye and rapid firing the shutter.”
He closed his eyes, placed his right hand over his mouth, and considered his words for a moment before returning her gaze and claiming, “This camera requires composure and composition. When you have to take a reading with a light meter, then calculate and manually set the f-stop and shutter, you’re not just a picture taker, but an artist. You meld with your medium.”
Jill’s loud laughter startled the old man. “You know, you sound just like some of my professors. Of course, when I shot medium format, everything was manual. The institute supplied us with those 120’s that look like black boxes with two lenses on the front, and you have to look down from the top to see the image. My photos on display at the coffeehouse were taken with one of those twin lens reflexes.”
Leaning back in his chair, Jerome opened his hands palm up in front of himself and said, “Then let’s go look at those photos.”
Jill raised her glass and finished her drink in one swallow, shook her head, rose and walked over to the table where her friends sat. Jerome left his glass half full and stood by the door waiting for her. One of her acquaintances looked his way, a girl with reddish blond hair who smiled and waved at him. He smiled back and nodded.
Looping her arm through his, Jill led him out onto the street and stated, “They said they might join us, but they won’t. Photography isn’t their thing.” He thought he should feel uncomfortable walking with her arm in arm, but he didn’t.
* * *
There was a low wooden table scarred with cup rings and spilled beverages. She drank a frozen coffee. He drank a hot spiced tea with milk. They sat on a sofa across the narrow room from the eight photographs hanging on the wall. Eight 10x10’s. Color. Compositionally correct. Textbook precise, marketable, pictures. And these were the terms he used to compliment them.
“I understand what you mean. I know I take good photos,” she said. “I want to take great ones.”
“Then lose the color,” Jerome suggested.
“I don’t buy that philosophy that great prints must be black and white,” she replied.
“What I mean is learn to see with shades of gray,” he explained.
She leaned in close to him, lit a cigarette, and stated, “You don’t like color.”
He folded his arms across his chest, thought for a moment, then replied, “No. I like color. It just seems to me that it’s wasted.” Arms still folded he began gesturing with his left hand. “People shoot the colors, and not the object. If we see what we’re shooting, then we can allow color in. If we shoot for color, then we lose the object.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Jill replied.
“The camera sees in gray,” he explained. Then gesturing towards her far side, he said, “Describe the lamp next to you.”
She looked at the lamp and stated, “It’s a floor lamp. Skinny gold pole with a white plastic shade, open at the top so the light shines up.”
“Exactly,” he responded excitedly. “Now, close your eyes, touch it and describe it to me.”
With her eyes shut Jill reached out to the lamp. She wrapped her hand around the lamp pole, then released her grip and rubbed her fingers gently around it. “It has slight ridges,” she said smiling. “I hadn’t noticed.” She moved her hand towards the top and said, “There is a filigree where the lamp stand joins the shade. And the shade has texture. It feels like a drum head. Like tightly stretched leather.”
She opened her eyes and commented, “It looks different. I see this every day I work, but this is the first time I’ve looked at it.”
He joked, “And you didn’t even touch the base.”
Leaning over the edge of the sofa and looking down, she laughed and exclaimed, “There’s a wad of chewing gum stuck to it!” Then thoughtfully added, “That change’s the whole context of the image.”
Lifting his tea from the coffee table, he asked, “Would you like to shoot the sunrise?”
“You mean, like in the morning?”
“Yes. The fountain on the square. For years I’ve wanted to shoot that in the early sun with a twin lens, but I’ve never gotten around to doing it. You do good medium format work, so if you’ll meet me, that’ll be my incentive.”
“You mean, like six in the morning.”
“Yes. Like six in the morning. Can you make it?”
“Yes. I don’t have class until afternoon, so I can meet you there,” she stated with a voice that carried an edge of resolution. “I will be there.”
* * *
When he arrived, a Yashica twin lens around his neck, carrying a tripod in one hand, and a metal, seventies-era camera case in the other, she was waiting for him with a new Canon EOS, an 80-200 mm Sigma lens, and a soft, nineties-era camera bag.
“Jill! You’ve got a Canon. Not a Nikon?” he joked.
“Yes,” she responded. “I decided I’d rather get more bang for my buck.”
He smiled, then nodded while setting up his Bogen tripod. Silently he screwed the attachment plate to the bottom of the Yashica, then removing the strap from his neck he clipped the camera to the tripod head. He flipped open the metallic top covering the viewfinder, pushed the magnifier into place, and peered down into the 2 ¼ inch square view. While he was doing this, Jill was shooting his every movement, the near silent hum of various motors signaling the fact her camera was in full auto modes.
He lifted the tripod, camera still attached, and took a couple of steps back. “Too close,” he mused. He could hear the hum of her camera focusing, and the barely audible shutter. He observed, “On the old SLRs the lenses were silent, but the shutters sounded like a jailhouse door slamming shut. Yours is much quieter than I thought it would be.”
She stopped looking through the prism and said, “You’ve never shot an autofocus?”
He replied, “Except for a weapon in the army, I’ve never shot an auto anything. All my cameras are manual.”
Pulling the camera from her neck, she put it around his and said, “Try it.”
Lifting it with both hands, he raised and lowered the Canon as if getting a sense of the weight. “It is much heavier than I would have thought,” he stated while raising the prism to his eye. Pointing the lens at Jill while she gave him instructions, Jerome pressed the shutter halfway down. He could feel the vibration of the inner lens spinning, but the housing never moved. She came into sharp focus, and he smoothly pressed the button down, completing the photo.
“Nice. And it uses aperture priority?” he asked.
Jill’s hands became animated as she began to explain, “You can use aperture, or shutter, or automatic, or manual. You can set depth of field, and step exposure up or down . . .”
He interrupted, “Slow down. You don’t have to convince me. I’m getting out of the game, remember?” Taking a bow, he waved towards the Yashica and said, “Would you like to take a picture of the fountain? The camera is waiting.”
“But you want to shoot it,” she protested.
“It’s OK. You go ahead,” he replied.
“What are you after?”
“Just the soft morning light on the water.”
The pyramid shaped fountain was in three levels, with the water overflowing from the top into the next pool down, and into pools located on the sides, which all flowed into the lowest and largest pool at the bottom.
Jill pulled a hand-held light meter from her pocket and took a reading. Putting the meter away, she adjusted the f-stop and shutter. She looked through the viewfinder, and he wondered how she felt about seeing everything backwards. It was something he was never quite able to get used to.
While adjusting the tripod head, she stated, “I’m placing the bottom line of the grid so it covers the bottom of the fountain. Will that work for you?”
“How does the shot look?”
“It has almost twice the space at the bottom, as the top, and puts the upper fountain an equal distance from the top of the viewfinder as the ends are from the edges,” she explained.
“Sounds great,” Jerome said. “Go for it.”
Turning a knob on the camera’s side, she focused, then pressed the shutter release. As with most twin lens cameras, there was no sound.
“I want to try different exposures to get various depths of field and stop the water action,” she said.
“That’s a great idea,” Jerome replied.
She advanced the film, adjusted the f-stop and shutter to different levels, pressed the shutter lock next to the lower lens, and shot again. And again. All the while Jerome was recording her with his Contax.
She looked at him. Looked at his camera curiously. He snapped her photo.
“So this is the famous rangefinder,” she said with a slight touch of awe.
He handed the camera to her. She took it carefully. She gently rubbed her fingers across the leather-wrapped metal. She held the camera in the palm of her left hand, and with the thumb and forefinger of her right she turned the focusing ring on the silver, spool-shaped lens.
She marveled, “I’ve never seen a lens like this one.” Holding it up even with her eye, she stated, “It’s elegant. May I?”
“Please do,” Jerome responded.
Watching through the lens of the Canon, he followed her as she took a reading, set the exposure, and peered through the rangefinder’s window. He held the shutter release half way down as she turned the focusing ring on the lens and drew her elbows close to her sides. He waited until he saw her chest rise slightly, and he was certain of the precise moment she was holding her breath, and in that moment, he followed through with the shot of this young woman, with an antique camera, taking a photo of this old man melding with the medium.
He noticed her when she came in with her friends. Perhaps it was her smile, or the way she laughed, loudly, but not offensively. Still there was no reason he should notice her. He had grandchildren her age; besides, he was not looking for a woman.
How many times did she catch him looking at her? Three at least. He reasoned that he must stop or she would think him a dirty old man, and that wasn’t something he wanted anyone to think. He stole one more glance. Only that time, she was already looking at him. She began to make her way across the room towards his stool at the end of the highly polished cherry wood bar. “Do you know me?” she quizzed.
“No, no,” he quietly answered staring into the glass held by the fingertips of his large hands.
Smiling, she replied, “Payment for staring at me, then, is you have to buy me a drink.”
She must be a whore, he thought. A professional whore. One who does it for money, because no casual whore, only looking for a little fun, would waste her time on an old man. Then he looked into her eyes, and he knew he had been mistaken—she was not a prostitute. He had photographed enough hookers to know. Her eyes were neither hungry, nor hollow. With a trained eye he observed her face. The pores of her skin were tight. The light from behind the counter struck her left side, the illumination accented the outline of her face. Her forehead was too high, too much flesh on her cheeks, and her hair was too clean. If her hair were dirty, hanging in strands, then she would make an interesting print. But not now. She was too clean.
“All right, I’ll buy you a drink, but only if you join me while you drink it,” he said.
Motioning to the occupied seat next to his, she stated. “You’ll have to join me and my friends at our table.”
Glancing at her friends, seeing them at their table, he was certain they didn’t want a grandfather joining them, and, even if they did, he had long ago lost the energy for riotous laughter and grandiose behavior. “No, it’s all right. I’ll buy you a drink, but I’ll stay here.”
Shaking her head, she negotiated, “We will take a table of our own.”
Looking around the bar, she pointed towards the front of the room. “Over there by the window. We can watch the world pass by. And if my friends want to join us, then they can.”
“And what will you and I talk about over there by the window?” he said laughing.
Her thin lips curled into an impish grin as she placed her delicate hand on his grizzled paw and replied, “Negatives. And positives. We will talk about Ilford and Fuji, kodachrome, 35 millimeter, 120, and glass plates.” She was giggling as she revealed, “I know you. I’ve followed your work since I was in high school.” Lowering her voice she shared, “It was you who inspired me. I am also a photographer.
“My parents took me to your shows at local galleries. My father always said you were a great photographer. ‘Too good for this town’ is how he would put it, and now I want to shoot like you. My favorite print is the children playing in the ruins. But I also love the street people, derelicts in the bars, the homeless digging through dumpsters. I want to capture the streets on film.”
The old man stood from his stool, gently took her hand, and said, “Then let’s go sit by the window and talk about film if you like.” Letting go of her hand, he spoke to the bartender, “Bring this lady whatever she wants.”
In answer to the bartender’s gaze she said, “A rum and Coke.” He nodded and turned to the bottles lining the wall behind him.
They strolled to a small round table located next to a plate glass window, and motioning for her to sit, he pulled out a wooden chair situated so that her right side was to the window and her back towards the bar. He took the seat opposite her, placing himself with his back into the corner, where the crumbling red brick wall joined the silver metal frame supporting the glass. He pulled his sweater closer around himself to ward off the slight chill coming in through the window, and noticed that she seemed unfazed by the late October air.
He asked, “What’s your name?”
“Jill. Jill Webb,” she replied. “And you are Mr. Parker.”
He nodded. “Jerome. Call me Jerome. So Jill, you’re a photographer?”
“Yes. That is, I’m going to be one. I’m a student at the art institute. I have my show at the end of next semester.”
“That’s very good,” he noted while paying the bartender for her drink.
“Not all that good,” she responded. “Everyone gets a show. It's a requirement for graduation. It will be good if I make my professors happy.”
“Of course.”
“Actually, I have a small show right now at the coffee shop down the street”
“Oh yeah? Tell me about it.”
Slouching lower into her chair, she stated, “It’s not much really. I work there, so the manager lets me hang some photos.” Then sitting erect she said, “But what I wanted to ask you is why did you close your studio?”
“Old age mainly. At 72 going to work has become a bore, and the cold winters are getting to me. I’ve bought a small place near my son in Florida, to be near family.”
“What part? We used to vacation on the gulf. Destin. The white sands of the miracle mile,” she exclaimed tossing her hands up as if throwing sand into the air.
“St. Augustine.”
She smiled knowingly. “Ah yes. A lovely place for photography.”
“None of that. I’m retiring. Everything in my shop is going to be auctioned off this week. You should come. Be plenty of good deals there,” he commented with a wink.
“Maybe I will,” she answered. “Just maybe I will. But, you’ll have to take a camera to Florida. It’s almost a federal law. You can’t go to Florida without a camera.”
“I’ll keep my Contax rangefinder. I got it in Dresden near the end of the war. My unit came into the city following the bombings in ‘45. We were supposed to clean out the enemy and rescue the Allied troops imprisoned there. When we swept through the remains of the Contax factory, I took a camera and two lenses as souvenirs. That was the first camera I ever owned. No electronics. No digital images. No light meter.” Holding his right hand out as if he were panhandling, he added, “If I had known at the time what a light meter was, I would have looked for a body with one.” Shaking his head with a smile, then gently slapping his cheek with his palm, he stated, “But I didn’t know.”
Raising his glass, he took a sip and pursed his lips. “I took that camera and two lenses. I didn’t know how to use it, so from my first roll of film I only got three good images. One of the photos you mentioned—the children in the rubble—I took that at Dresden with that first roll of film. When it was all said and done, the Russians got the factories, and the United States got the scientists that worked in them.”
A momentary silence was broken when she observed, “That camera is fifty-four years old. That's older than my father. Does it still work?”
“As good as new. It’s never had any work done on it, but the lenses fog, so I have to get them cleaned occasionally, but the Zeiss optics are perfect. Of course it takes longer to get the settings right than on the newer cameras, but that forces you to create the photograph. There is no throwing the camera to your eye and rapid firing the shutter.”
He closed his eyes, placed his right hand over his mouth, and considered his words for a moment before returning her gaze and claiming, “This camera requires composure and composition. When you have to take a reading with a light meter, then calculate and manually set the f-stop and shutter, you’re not just a picture taker, but an artist. You meld with your medium.”
Jill’s loud laughter startled the old man. “You know, you sound just like some of my professors. Of course, when I shot medium format, everything was manual. The institute supplied us with those 120’s that look like black boxes with two lenses on the front, and you have to look down from the top to see the image. My photos on display at the coffeehouse were taken with one of those twin lens reflexes.”
Leaning back in his chair, Jerome opened his hands palm up in front of himself and said, “Then let’s go look at those photos.”
Jill raised her glass and finished her drink in one swallow, shook her head, rose and walked over to the table where her friends sat. Jerome left his glass half full and stood by the door waiting for her. One of her acquaintances looked his way, a girl with reddish blond hair who smiled and waved at him. He smiled back and nodded.
Looping her arm through his, Jill led him out onto the street and stated, “They said they might join us, but they won’t. Photography isn’t their thing.” He thought he should feel uncomfortable walking with her arm in arm, but he didn’t.
* * *
There was a low wooden table scarred with cup rings and spilled beverages. She drank a frozen coffee. He drank a hot spiced tea with milk. They sat on a sofa across the narrow room from the eight photographs hanging on the wall. Eight 10x10’s. Color. Compositionally correct. Textbook precise, marketable, pictures. And these were the terms he used to compliment them.
“I understand what you mean. I know I take good photos,” she said. “I want to take great ones.”
“Then lose the color,” Jerome suggested.
“I don’t buy that philosophy that great prints must be black and white,” she replied.
“What I mean is learn to see with shades of gray,” he explained.
She leaned in close to him, lit a cigarette, and stated, “You don’t like color.”
He folded his arms across his chest, thought for a moment, then replied, “No. I like color. It just seems to me that it’s wasted.” Arms still folded he began gesturing with his left hand. “People shoot the colors, and not the object. If we see what we’re shooting, then we can allow color in. If we shoot for color, then we lose the object.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Jill replied.
“The camera sees in gray,” he explained. Then gesturing towards her far side, he said, “Describe the lamp next to you.”
She looked at the lamp and stated, “It’s a floor lamp. Skinny gold pole with a white plastic shade, open at the top so the light shines up.”
“Exactly,” he responded excitedly. “Now, close your eyes, touch it and describe it to me.”
With her eyes shut Jill reached out to the lamp. She wrapped her hand around the lamp pole, then released her grip and rubbed her fingers gently around it. “It has slight ridges,” she said smiling. “I hadn’t noticed.” She moved her hand towards the top and said, “There is a filigree where the lamp stand joins the shade. And the shade has texture. It feels like a drum head. Like tightly stretched leather.”
She opened her eyes and commented, “It looks different. I see this every day I work, but this is the first time I’ve looked at it.”
He joked, “And you didn’t even touch the base.”
Leaning over the edge of the sofa and looking down, she laughed and exclaimed, “There’s a wad of chewing gum stuck to it!” Then thoughtfully added, “That change’s the whole context of the image.”
Lifting his tea from the coffee table, he asked, “Would you like to shoot the sunrise?”
“You mean, like in the morning?”
“Yes. The fountain on the square. For years I’ve wanted to shoot that in the early sun with a twin lens, but I’ve never gotten around to doing it. You do good medium format work, so if you’ll meet me, that’ll be my incentive.”
“You mean, like six in the morning.”
“Yes. Like six in the morning. Can you make it?”
“Yes. I don’t have class until afternoon, so I can meet you there,” she stated with a voice that carried an edge of resolution. “I will be there.”
* * *
When he arrived, a Yashica twin lens around his neck, carrying a tripod in one hand, and a metal, seventies-era camera case in the other, she was waiting for him with a new Canon EOS, an 80-200 mm Sigma lens, and a soft, nineties-era camera bag.
“Jill! You’ve got a Canon. Not a Nikon?” he joked.
“Yes,” she responded. “I decided I’d rather get more bang for my buck.”
He smiled, then nodded while setting up his Bogen tripod. Silently he screwed the attachment plate to the bottom of the Yashica, then removing the strap from his neck he clipped the camera to the tripod head. He flipped open the metallic top covering the viewfinder, pushed the magnifier into place, and peered down into the 2 ¼ inch square view. While he was doing this, Jill was shooting his every movement, the near silent hum of various motors signaling the fact her camera was in full auto modes.
He lifted the tripod, camera still attached, and took a couple of steps back. “Too close,” he mused. He could hear the hum of her camera focusing, and the barely audible shutter. He observed, “On the old SLRs the lenses were silent, but the shutters sounded like a jailhouse door slamming shut. Yours is much quieter than I thought it would be.”
She stopped looking through the prism and said, “You’ve never shot an autofocus?”
He replied, “Except for a weapon in the army, I’ve never shot an auto anything. All my cameras are manual.”
Pulling the camera from her neck, she put it around his and said, “Try it.”
Lifting it with both hands, he raised and lowered the Canon as if getting a sense of the weight. “It is much heavier than I would have thought,” he stated while raising the prism to his eye. Pointing the lens at Jill while she gave him instructions, Jerome pressed the shutter halfway down. He could feel the vibration of the inner lens spinning, but the housing never moved. She came into sharp focus, and he smoothly pressed the button down, completing the photo.
“Nice. And it uses aperture priority?” he asked.
Jill’s hands became animated as she began to explain, “You can use aperture, or shutter, or automatic, or manual. You can set depth of field, and step exposure up or down . . .”
He interrupted, “Slow down. You don’t have to convince me. I’m getting out of the game, remember?” Taking a bow, he waved towards the Yashica and said, “Would you like to take a picture of the fountain? The camera is waiting.”
“But you want to shoot it,” she protested.
“It’s OK. You go ahead,” he replied.
“What are you after?”
“Just the soft morning light on the water.”
The pyramid shaped fountain was in three levels, with the water overflowing from the top into the next pool down, and into pools located on the sides, which all flowed into the lowest and largest pool at the bottom.
Jill pulled a hand-held light meter from her pocket and took a reading. Putting the meter away, she adjusted the f-stop and shutter. She looked through the viewfinder, and he wondered how she felt about seeing everything backwards. It was something he was never quite able to get used to.
While adjusting the tripod head, she stated, “I’m placing the bottom line of the grid so it covers the bottom of the fountain. Will that work for you?”
“How does the shot look?”
“It has almost twice the space at the bottom, as the top, and puts the upper fountain an equal distance from the top of the viewfinder as the ends are from the edges,” she explained.
“Sounds great,” Jerome said. “Go for it.”
Turning a knob on the camera’s side, she focused, then pressed the shutter release. As with most twin lens cameras, there was no sound.
“I want to try different exposures to get various depths of field and stop the water action,” she said.
“That’s a great idea,” Jerome replied.
She advanced the film, adjusted the f-stop and shutter to different levels, pressed the shutter lock next to the lower lens, and shot again. And again. All the while Jerome was recording her with his Contax.
She looked at him. Looked at his camera curiously. He snapped her photo.
“So this is the famous rangefinder,” she said with a slight touch of awe.
He handed the camera to her. She took it carefully. She gently rubbed her fingers across the leather-wrapped metal. She held the camera in the palm of her left hand, and with the thumb and forefinger of her right she turned the focusing ring on the silver, spool-shaped lens.
She marveled, “I’ve never seen a lens like this one.” Holding it up even with her eye, she stated, “It’s elegant. May I?”
“Please do,” Jerome responded.
Watching through the lens of the Canon, he followed her as she took a reading, set the exposure, and peered through the rangefinder’s window. He held the shutter release half way down as she turned the focusing ring on the lens and drew her elbows close to her sides. He waited until he saw her chest rise slightly, and he was certain of the precise moment she was holding her breath, and in that moment, he followed through with the shot of this young woman, with an antique camera, taking a photo of this old man melding with the medium.