The Paid Hours and the Unpaid Ones

Three graduation shoots in one Saturday, all of them on the same hill above the city because everyone wants the same view and nobody wants to walk far. I wore the camel cardigan that is too thin for October and regretted it by nine. My hands were red between frames. I kept them in my pockets and laughed at jokes I had heard four times that morning.

I charge too little. I know I charge too little. A friend who shoots weddings told me the number I should say out loud, and I said a smaller one. The students are my age or a year younger, they have four people at home waiting for one good picture, and I have rent.

What They Actually Want

Nobody wants a photograph. They want to look like the day mattered. So I put them against the wall where the light bounces, I tell them to walk toward me and not to look at the camera, and for about ten minutes they forget to hold their shoulders up. That is the only skill I have. It's not small, but it isn't large either.

Give me ten minutes of not posing and I'll give you back a person.

The third one brought her mother, who stood behind me and directed. Chin down. Smile properly. Not that smile. I shot anyway, and afterwards the mother shook my hand and said I had a good eye, which is what people say when they mean you were patient.

I edited them that night with the radiator ticking. Straightened the horizon, evened out the light, removed a bin. I do not remove people's faces or their tiredness. There's a girl in one of them with her hair out of place and I left it, because the wind was real and she was laughing at something her brother said.

Walking Home the Long Way

I got paid in cash that smelled like a kiosk. On the way home I came down through the old town instead of taking the tram, because at that hour the shop lights and the wet stone do something the hill never does. I took about twenty frames. None of them are for anyone.

One kind of work pays for the other. Nobody pays for the other.

My mother asks when I'll start charging properly. I say when I'm good. She says that's not how it works, and she is probably right, and I will raise my prices next spring, and I will feel guilty about it, and I will do it anyway.