Page 15 of Goode Vibrations
“So you’re, like, a nature photographer?”
“Sort of.” I scrubbed my hand through my hair. “I get the odd shots, the ones that make you go ‘bloody hell, how’d he get that one?’”
She squinted hard, thinking. “You know, my roommate’s mom gave her a lifetime subscription toNational Geographic, so she had crates of old issues, and the newest one was always laying around.” She grinned sheepishly. “It was what we looked at in the bathroom, actually.”
“Not your phone?”
“I mean sure, but I once read that taking your phone into the bathroom with you is actually really gross, due to the way germs move around in bathrooms, so I’ve tried to not do it as much.” She waved. “Point is, I’ve probably seen your work.”
“Most people don’t really pay particular attention to the photographer byline, so no worries that you don’t know the name.” I grinned, making a joke out of it. “Did you see last month’s issue?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you read the article on natural sinkholes?”
“Yeah, actually. Wait, that was you?”
“The photos, yeah.”
“Like, the one from the bottom of the giant sinkholes in the forest? That was a great shot.”
“Sarisarinama. Those are in Venezuela, yeah. To get that shot, I rappelled down the hole, for which I had to get special permission from the Venezuelan government.”
“Any others I might immediately recognize?”
I shrugged. “I mean, I’ve done loads of features.”
“So you’ve been all over, then.”
“God, yeah. Everywhere. I haven’t done Antarctica yet, but I did one on the break up of the ice in the North Pole, where I got lots of cool shots from on top of these huge icebergs just off the ice shelf.”
“Oh shit, yeah, I saw that feature! The underwater one, where you can see how much bigger it is under the water? That one was incredible.”
“Yeah, I spent like three days in a dry suit getting that shot. Took maybe a thousand photos and finally got that one, the rest are just fuckin’ rubbish. All you could see was the top and the water. Still dunno what made the difference, but the water just cleared up at the right moment, and I got the shot.”
“Wow. Pretty cool.”
“Froze my sac off, you mean. Even in a dry suit, that water iscold. Had to get out every so often, warm up, let my camera warm up, and then get back in.”
“The whale in the one shot toward the end of the feature? How cool was it to be so close to a whale like that?”
“Cool? Try terrifying. I about pissed my pants, I was so scared. She just came up out of nowhere, about knocked me clear out of the water with her tail, too. Like, you’re just swimming along trying to get a shot of the berg, then just bam, there’s this great big fuckin’ whale the size of a building swimming past you, silent as a fuckin’ ghost, and you just…you realize just likethat, you donotbelong in that world. You’re a tiny, fragile, weak little thing that belongs on land, and even just swimming past innocent as anything, she could kill you. The current of her swimming past some ten or fifteen feet away sent me spinning as it was, and if I hadn’t had the camera clipped to my webbing, I’d have lost it. You don’t know what it’s like, you really don’t. So yeah, it’s cool, like it’s a memory I’ll never forget as long as I fuckin’ live, but fuck me, it was scary.”
“You got the shot, though.”
“Hell yeah, I got the shot. Second I felt her going past I had the shutter going.”
“Is that the scariest thing that’s ever happened to you?”
I cackled. “Not even almost. My whole job is scary shit. It’s what I do.”
She had her camera on her lap and fiddled idly with the focus ring. “So you’re a professional adrenaline junkie.”
“Yeah, that’s about right. But it’s not about the adrenaline as much as it is the rush of getting a photo no one else has ever got, or will ever get.”
“Oh. Well, that I understand, to some degree. I bet you have some cool stories.”
“People tend to assume I’m making them up to sound cool, so I usually downplay the truth a bit, if anything.”