Complex Numbers

You Can't Deep End On Me

If there's one skill I've always had, it's the ability to keep my head above water.

PROMPT November 3rd

Write about a time when you were "thrown in the deep end." This can be taken literally or figuratively.

I mean the above both literally and figuratively, though these days, it seems "literally" serves double duty there.

I grew upspent my childhood near a large body of water. This was an estuary of the Potomac, which in turn is part of the Chesapeake Bay, which is essentially the flooded remnants of the Susquehanna River, submerged after the last Ice Age. That far from the ocean, the water is usually fresh, not saline. This matters because I've been to the Dead Sea, so I know from experience that it's easier to float in water with a high salt content; the point is that when I was a kid I wasn't overweight and could have easily sunk in the estuary. But I didn't, because one of the first things my dad taught me was how to swim.

And he did it the old-fashioned way, like he did most things: took me out to where he could stand but I couldn't, and let me go. It worked.

I never became a strong swimmer, but I could dog-paddle with the best of them, so the "deep end" never really fazed me. Of course, later in life, my density only decreased (fat is less dense than muscle) so floating only became easier. Exactly the opposite of walking on land.

Which is not to say I'm in any way graceful in the water, which leads me to the "figurative" response to the prompt.

One of the few artistic skills I had, besides some small ability at writing, was photography. I use the past tense, because I don't do it much these days. Oh, sure, I snap pics with my mobile from time to time like most people, and I retain some sense of framing and composition, but I don't worry too much about other technical aspects of photography. But back in college, long before everyone walked around with a camera in their pocket, I was good enough to use it to earn beer money.

My foray into semi-professional photography took two paths: photojournalism, which at the University newspaper took the form of not only random pictures of stuff going around on Grounds (that would be a "campus" anywhere but UVA), but also concert and sports photography; and also, I got hired by an actual professional photographer to document fraternity and sorority parties and, later, weddings. None of this paid a great deal, but like I said, beer money.

I like to think I was pretty good at it. My sports photos in particular were well-received, because I seemed to have a knack for knowing when something interesting was about to happen in a sportsball game. And okay, I also had a really fast automatic... whatever it was called. A thing that advanced the film faster than my thumb could. I don't even remember what the damn thing was called, it's been so long. Of course, it's archaic now because there's no film to advance with digital photography, but back then it was a Big Deal. I also got really good at swapping out rolls of film. Point is, I could do stuff like follow a quarterback, shooting a frame every half a second or so, so the result was almost like video.

And yet, I'd never messed around with video, even when digital video started to become a thing. I just wasn't interested. Still-shot photography was my focus (pun absolutely intended) and I didn't want to stop (pun even more absolutely intended) doing that. The whole idea made me shutter (okay, last photography pun, I promise).

So when my party-and-wedding-photographer boss came to me and said, "I have another photographer that can handle this wedding, but no videographer, so I need you to handle the filming," I gulped.

(Obviously this was a long time ago so I don't remember the exact words used but hopefully I'm conveying the gist of it.)

"I've never done video," I said. Which isn't entirely true; I'd messed around with my dad's movie camera once, a tiny thing that was light and easy for a kid to handle, but the results had been... unfortunate, which is one reason I never took up cinema.

"It's okay," said the boss. "You know how a wedding goes. Just concentrate on the bride and groom. Mostly the bride. Maybe get some dancing at the reception. That sort of thing."

"Really, I have no idea what I'm doing."

"You're a great photographer. This isn't so different. Besides, it pays more than stills."

The combination of money and flattery always works on me, so I agreed.

So come the day of the wedding, he hands me one of those fifty-pound movie cameras that dig into one's shoulder. Hey, that was the height of technology in the 80s, I suppose. It even had gyro-stabilizers, from what I recall, which meant that I wouldn't have to work too hard to keep the camera steady... but panning was an absolute chore. I could explain the physics of that, but experiencing it was something else entirely.

There I was, then, with a camera that weighed almost as much as I did (at the time), one that wanted to turn at weird angles because of the gyroscopes, and whose controls I had to figure out on the fly: Focus here. Zoom there. Aperture with this ring. Also, it had the old-fashioned viewfinder, because, if I recall correctly, LED screens were barely an itch in some inventor's pants at the time. What that meant was that I had to keep the thing glued to my eye, which in turn meant that my peripheral vision was shot; if something happened to my right, I'd only find out about it too late, and then I'd have to pan the bloody bulky contraption over in that direction (boss said he'd edit out the twisty parts later).

And, just to emphasize this once more, this was a wedding. It may not be a once-in-a-lifetime event for people these days (or even in the 80s), but there's pressure to get things right, because it's not like you can get all the guests back together in a month for a reshoot.

My friends, I tried. Shoved into the deep end, I flailed around and attempted to keep my head above water, but goddamn if I didn't sink like a stone (the fifty-pound movie camera didn't help there).

No amount of editing could fix the result. Shit was out of focus. Zoom was all over the place. And in spite of the stabilizers, the video ended up shaky -- which could have been passed off as "artistic license" in just ten short years, but that the time, it was an absolute ruin.

Now, obviously, it's been over 30 years now, and that camera was probably not as heavy or as unwieldy as I remember. Memory is funny that way. But the result, I'm absolutely certain of: abject failure.

He paid me anyway, because he was that kind of boss. But obviously I never again shot video at a wedding. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Well, the occasional thing on my phone, which is much easier to use (technology has come a long way in 30 years), but I'm still not happy with the results.

Oh, I'm sure that, given time and practice, I could shoot a decent video. I would at least know to hold the fucking camera sideways; the only thing I hate worse than present-tense narrative in fiction is vertical video. But the idea just doesn't hold much interest for me.

I still take still pictures sometimes, though I wouldn't bestow the title of "photography" on the results. Scroll through my phone gallery and it's like: beer, beer, brewery, beer menu, beer, beer, steak, mixed drink, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, bottle of wine, bottle of scotch, beer, beer, tacos, beer, beer menu, brewery sign, beer, beer, beer, cat, cat, cat, cat...