The Amish Groom ~ Men of Lancaster County Book 1 (25 page)

“Okay, Farmer John, let’s see what you got.”

Setting aside my own cup of black coffee, I pulled the first camera from my bag and set it down in front of her.

“Good grief, where did you get this?” she asked as she picked it up to inspect it. “The world’s worst yard sale?”

“I told you. I found some cameras at my father’s house.”

“Right. Well, if you can call this piece of junk a camera. Next?”

She gave it back and kept her hand held out for another. I produced the second one from my bag, though it didn’t fare much better. At least she looked at it for a little longer, but in the end it was a reject as well.

“It’s just a cheap little point-and-shoot,” she said, handing it back to me. “And it needs charging. I guess you could use it for practice when you’re on your own, but not for our lesson time, okay? I’d rather let you use my camera than bother with that thing.”

Nodding, I returned it to the bag and pulled out the final choice, which was bigger and heavier—and much older and more banged up—than the first two. I thought it would get the biggest scorn of all, but instead, the moment I pulled it from its worn leather case, Lark nearly spit out her coffee.

With a gasp, she put down her cup and grabbed the camera from my hand.

“What the heck, Ty?” she practically screamed. “Where did you get this?”

I sat back, startled. “A cabinet in my dad’s study. Why?”

“Good grief, man, it’s a Leica. A
classic
Leica.”

She spoke as if I would know what that meant. I waited for an explanation, but she grew silent after that, every speck of her attention focused on the instrument in her hand.

Cradling it carefully, she examined the thing on every side, her fingers testing out each moving part, and then she held it to her eye and fiddled with it some more. Though I was eager to know what on earth she was so excited about, I was content to wait until she was ready to tell me. I just sipped my coffee and watched her put the device through its paces. When she was finally finished, the look she gave me was one of pure joy.

“You have no idea how awesome this is. I mean, it looks pretty banged up on the outside, but on the inside…Aw, man, I’m so jealous.”

“I take it this one is not a piece a junk?”

“Are you kidding? A lot of photographers consider this particular model to be one of the best cameras ever made. The thing’s a
tank
, man. I mean, sure, if it were mine and I had the money, I might get the prism resilvered, and maybe do a whole cosmetic makeover. But even without all of that, this is a true find. A real treasure. I can’t believe your dad had it tucked away in a cabinet.”

“Is it valuable?”

“Uh, yeah. Are you kidding me?”

“Then I have a feeling it belongs to Liz. She’s into photography too.”

Of course, the thought crossed my mind that this camera could have belonged to my mother—it certainly seemed old enough—but then I doubted that conclusion for several reasons. First, my parents probably wouldn’t have bought anything so expensive back then, no matter how much my mom enjoyed photography. Liz, on the other hand, had come from money, so that seemed far more likely. Second, my father would have had no reason to hang on to a camera of my mother’s after she died. He would have discarded it—along with everything else of hers that he didn’t need—because he had to move around so much. As a military man, he was meticulous about his possessions, super organized, and quick to get rid of anything once it was no longer necessary.

Just like he’d gotten rid of me.

Startled at the thought and how it had just popped into my mind like that, I looked away. For some things, I reminded myself, forgiveness was not a one-time deal. I had forgiven him years ago, but clearly it was time to do so yet again. As Lark returned her attention to the camera, I said a quick prayer, asking God to purge my heart of any resentment and to forgive me, just as I was determined to again forgive my father.

She continued to study the camera and then finally asked if she could keep it.

“Excuse me?”

“I’d like to take it home with me, give it a good cleaning, and load it up with film and batteries.”

“Oh. Sure. Just don’t forget to add the cost to my bill.”

She nodded, tucking the battered old classic into her own camera bag.

“We can both share my camera today. I was planning to focus on digital photography anyway, rather than film, so you could learn about composition.”

“Composition?”

She shrugged. “With some people, I might start elsewhere, like teaching the various camera settings and what they mean—exposure, depth of field, shutter speed—stuff like that. But for you, I think composition is the best place to begin. If you’ve never even held a camera before, you need to get a feel for the fun part first, the creative part. The technical stuff can follow later.”

“Okay. Sounds good.”

“Great. So let’s cover the basics, and then we can roll.”

Lark leaned forward and placed her camera in my hands. I held it awkwardly, so after a pause she positioned my fingers where they should go, lingering in a way that made me feel uneasy. I couldn’t exactly pull my hands away, at least not without dropping the camera, so I was relieved when she finally finished and sat back in her chair.

After that, she gave me a quick tour of her camera, showing me how it worked and teaching me the terms for its various parts, such as the viewfinder and the lens. Once I felt confident enough to give it a try, she had me snap a picture of her there at the table, and then she brought it back up onto the little screen and used it to point out the “basics of composition,” as she called it. It was a lot to take in, but she was a surprisingly good teacher, leading me down the path of knowledge in just the right order.

“Let’s go,” she said finally. “I’ll talk as we walk.”

I paid the bill, insisting it was my turn this time, and we set out.

“The easiest way to compose a photo is to use the rule of thirds,” she said as we made our way down the sidewalk. “Think of your image as a rectangle divided into nine equal-sized segments. You know, mentally draw two vertical and two horizontal lines across it so that you have nine squares total.”

“Okay. I can see that.”

“Good. The most important elements in your scene should either fall along these lines or, better yet, at the points where they intersect. When we look at a picture, our eyes are naturally drawn there, so if you use them in your composition, you can pull us into the picture. You know how some pics are awesome and some are boring? The awesome ones are almost always composed along those lines. Here.”

Lark reached for the camera and knelt down on the sidewalk. She pointed the lens toward a flowering vine on a white picket fence. She snapped two photos and then got back to her feet, pressing a button on the camera and then handing it to me.

“See? First look at this one,” she said, showing me an image of the flower at the middle of the screen. It looked okay to me until she pressed a button to show the next picture, where the flower was instead located a little to the left, its bloom tilting vaguely toward the center.

“Which image is better? The first or the second?”

“I don’t know enough yet to say.”

“Just in your gut, Ty. Which one do you find more pleasing?”

“Okay, the second one,” I admitted. “But I don’t know why.”

She grinned. “The rule of thirds is why.”

She pointed out the placement of the stem and the bloom, and I nodded as understanding slowly began to dawn.

“Got it? Okay. Now, look how I used the invisible horizontal lines to draw your eye to what is keeping the flower tethered. The fence. See? The vine wants to venture out on its own, but it needs the fence to hold it up. And the fence isn’t going anywhere.”

I pulled my gaze from the little image on the screen to look at her face. “You saw all that when you took that photo?”

“You have to train your eye to see past the obvious. Here. You try. Look at that house across the street. What is your eye drawn to?”

I turned to look at the blue-and-white house across the narrow street from us. It was well-kept and festooned with half a dozen hanging geraniums. Lacy curtains hung in all the windows, and a striped cat sat in one of the sills.

“The cat, I guess.”

“You
guess
?”

“The cat.”

“Zoom in on the cat and then pull out. Imagine those nine squares.”

I tried to obey. But I couldn’t see the nine squares or anything else remarkable.

“See them?”

“Not really.”

She took the camera from me, fiddled with it, and then handed it back. Now on the little screen was a nine-square grid overlay.

“Cool.”

“Don’t get overly dependent on it.”

I tried again. I zoomed in on the cat so that he filled the right-hand side and pressed the shutter. I handed the camera to Lark and she pulled up the image.

“Okay. So what is this?”

I shrugged. “It’s a picture of a cat.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else. It’s just a picture of a cat.”

“That’s my point. Look at the house again. What do you see?”

I sighed. “Blue and white paint, a door, geraniums, windows, lacy curtains, and a cat.”

“How many windows?”

I counted them. Five on the first floor. Four on the second. “Nine that we can see.”

“And how many cats?”

“One. What are you getting at?”

“Try the photo again. This time include the two other windows closest to the cat. Match the symmetry of the empty windows with the symmetry of the horizontal and vertical lines.”

I did as I was told and snapped the shutter. When I looked at the picture I had taken, I was amazed at the difference. The first two thirds of the image contained two perfectly symmetrical windows, and then the last third contained a window just like the other two, but also not like them. Because this one held a cat. And my eye was drawn to it.

“Wow,” I said.

“This photo tells us a story. Several stories maybe.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

Lark smiled. “Yes. It is. Now let’s do some more.”

We continued walking toward Grand Canal and Beacon Bay, stopping along the way so I could take pictures of boats in their slips, footprints in the sand, and the wooden docks. Then we took a side street leading away from the water, where I tried a few more shots of buildings, trees, and people—when I could do it without drawing attention to myself.

Every few shots, Lark would offer some pointers so that I gradually began to feel more confident about the proper way to compose a photo, how to minimize shadows, and how to take advantage of the sun’s unique lighting. She also took the camera off its automatic setting so that I could experiment with manual focus and shutter speed. I took a number of duds, but Lark just deleted them and told me to try again.

By three fifteen, my mind was tired and I was ready for a break. Lark suggested more coffee, with cinnamon rolls this time.

“My kind of food,” I said, and I told her to lead the way.

We walked to yet another outdoor coffee shop. We settled at a table outside, this time choosing a spot in the sun rather than in the shade because the air was growing cooler.

“Are you having fun?” she asked.

“It’s more mentally exhausting than I thought it would be. There’s so much to consider. I had no idea.”

“When it becomes second nature to you, it won’t seem like work. Anything new is difficult until you get past the learning curve. You’re doing well.”

“Am I?”

She smiled. “Yes. Especially for someone who has never owned a camera before. Your mother would be proud.”

I smiled back. “I wish I could know what drew her to photography, but that’s not something anyone else could ever tell me. My Amish family wouldn’t know, of course. I doubt my dad would either.” I took a sip of my coffee.

“It’s probably not some complicated reason. In fact, I’m sure it’s not.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I know why I love it. Photography enables me to capture moments that would otherwise just blend into all the other moments that have passed. My photos are a reflection of me—what I see and how I see it. Just think about it, Tyler. We can freeze time and be able to look back at it years later, maybe seeing something new or different because even though the image hasn’t changed, we have.”

I took a bite of my cinnamon roll and used the moments my mouth was full to consider her words and wonder what my mother would have wanted to look back on over time. What moments might she have yearned to capture on film that would have otherwise just blended into all the other forgotten moments?

“Do you remember her?”

“I remember little things about her. Certain things she said to me. Or the way she said them. And my grandparents and other family members have told me a little.”