The Papa and the Paparazzo

Between travelling for work and spending lots of long hours at the office, I've felt like I haven't seen much of the kids the last couple of weeks. This Saturday L had a morning of choir practice lined up, but N was wide open, so I figured it would be a good time to do some one-on-one boy time. I called home from work on Friday and asked Stacy to give N the heads-up that we would go do something on Saturday morning.

Last Christmas I had upgraded my digital camera, and N, being the next in line for a cool hand-me-down, scored my old digital SLR to play with. (L has not been neglected; she acquired my desktop computer for her room when I upgraded that last year.) I was a little anxious about giving a fairly nice and not exactly inexpensive camera to a kid, but I figured I had no further use for it and couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of trying to sell it for the 40 or 50 bucks I might be able to get for it. And at least N intends to be careful with his stuff. He isn’t, mind you, but at least he wants to be. When I called home on Friday I suggested that N get his camera ready and I would get out my new one and we would get up early on Saturday and go out to a park or marsh or somewhere and go shooting.

I got home at an obscene hour, so I didn’t have a chance to confirm the plan with N that night. At 6am Saturday morning I was awakened by a harsh electronic bleating across the hall, and soon I had N tugging on my hand urging me up. “Oh, yeah,” muttered Stacy, rolling over bleary-eyed. “He’s quite excited about it. He was talking about it all night long last night. He said he was going to set his alarm so we wouldn’t waste any time.”

Really? I thought. N can barely be dragged out of bed before eight with a team of Clydesdales.

We dressed and gathered our equipment. The places I’d first considered going to (the Madrona Marsh and the South Coast Botanic Gardens) were not open till 9 or 10am, so I talked N into going out for a fortifying breakfast first. (You need energy to keep that shutter button finger in top form.) N suffered the delay nobly and we loaded out camera bags and headed off to Norm’s around 7am. While waiting for our pancakes we got out the cameras and did some preliminary pre-checks. Batteries were good. Lenses and filters all intact. We briefly went over a few of the various modes and when to use them. We even got a few discrete restaurant test shots in.

We managed to finish our breakfast without getting faux maple syrup all over any high-tech equipment, but we were still a good hour out from being able to get in to any of the gardens of choice. So we drove up the hill to Del Cerro park to kill an hour shooting from the cliffs. We talked about when to use landscape mode, when to use portrait mode. N loved the macro setting that allowed you to get within an inch of a flower and take super-close-up shots. We sat on a bench and switched to our telephoto lenses and tried (fairly unsuccessfully) to shoot a red hawk that was playing in the thermals coming up the cliffs.

You may call this a beetle on a dog turd.  We call it art.

I figured by 9am when the Botanic Gardens opened that N would have had his fill and be ready to go home and play hockey or Minecraft, but no. He was insistent that we go to the gardens. It wasn’t a particularly spectacular day weather wise. It was kinda gray and overcast. Not bad weather for portrait shooting, but not fantastic for flowers and landscapes. But N didn’t care, and the roses at the South Coast Botanic Garden were riotous enough to defy the dreary lighting. I gave him a few pointers and a suggestion here and there on a shot, but really, he just did his thing. By the time we were both mutually tired out we had logged about 300 cumulative photos. I was a little stunned at how nicely done some of his shots turned out. He seems to have an eye for framing and composition, though we hadn’t talked much about that at all.

  

On our way home we stopped at a 7-Eleven for a treat. “Daddy, can I have the super-jumbo Slurpee?” he asked, pointing to the bathtub-sized offering at the far right end of the myriad of cup options.

“No, that’s too big,” I said, directing him to a cup much further down on the smaller end of the continuum. He uncomplainingly filled his half-cherry/half-lemonade Slurpee and sucked away at it contentedly. It wasn’t until we had paid and were getting into the car that he brought it up again.

“Thanks, Dad! This is the biggest Slurpee I’ve ever had! Mommy only lets me get the very smallest one.”

DISCLAIMER: All the pictures above were taken by N,

Unless, of course, they are pictures of N.  

(And OK, the Slurpee pic was from the internet...  Sue me.)