Dean is taking a photo class at school, and loving it. Black and white, actual film -- learning how to process film and print his own photos. Loving it. I'm trying to let only the right dollop of my joy level show; yes, I want him to love it and have been trying for the past, oh, 11 years or so to put a camera in his hands, but I don't want to overwhelm him. I know I can be overwhelming when I mean well, so I'm trying to be an encouraging voice on the sidelines in a way that makes being there appreciated.
The rolls of film I ordered for him haven't arrived yet (I'll let you know if it turns out a certain online source was bogus or not). The 200 sheets of paper on which to print have arrived; I told him that being able to be free to do what it takes to get the print you want is important and it was a luxury neither Ken nor I really had during our own photo class days. He is working with a camera provided by school -- I haven't been able to convince him to try one of my cameras yet, but I did manage to get him to let me change the lens for him on our expedition today.
His weekend assignment was to shoot landscape, so I asked if he wanted to check out the beach. We're about an hour from the ocean but we rarely ever go -- traffic in the summer is ridiculous, and there isn't generally the enthusiasm for the leaving-before-dawn-to-get-a-parking-spot aspect of the journey. Today was sunny and cold-ish (45f) and windy and it felt fantastic to breathe in that salty air and walk -- although we should have brought hats and gloves and all. Next time. I'd planned to take us to a more wild/secluded-ish kind of beach, but a massive roadworks project meant we couldn't get there so we just stumbled upon a spot in Lynn with parking and a long, wide beach just waiting for us. (Boston area beach access tells a fascinating story of major wealth vs. old-time working class, as well as of the prominence of commercial verses recreational use of the ocean; as you can imagine, the story twines around accessibility to the water -- a concept which, as a Chicagoan raised on something like 25 miles of publicly accessible, beautiful lakefront, is foreign to me.)
