last week's shoot: married couple in nature

Danny loaded up the files from the anniversary shoot he did in Prospect Park. It was a great day for pictures -- warm, clear, slightly overcast, nice distribution of sun. The couple was pleasant enough, though they were kind of boring. Nancy and Howard. First anniversary.

He had to touch up a few things, color correction, some cropping. Nothing major. He loaded the photo reel and began scrolling through.

He replayed the afternoon in his mind while he looked at the pictures. Riding in the carriage, visiting the ice cream truck, walking through the trails ...

He stopped on a picture. He had been walking behind them, and they were holding hands. As the sequence of pictures continued, their hand-holding shifted from clasped and intertwined fingers between them to a tighter palm-to-palm grip behind Nancy's back. In the next picture, it looked like Howard had slid his hand into Nancy's back pocked. Right, Danny remembered, he was just getting a little ass grab.

Except now that he looked closer, it wasn't her pocked. Howard had put his hands inside her pants. Danny smiled. Nice work, dude. He clicked forward to the next few pictures, and not only was Howard's hand down the back of Nancy's pants, it was getting deeper as the sequence continued. By the time they reached the gazebo, and the camera angle was profile, he could see that Howard's left hand was so deep into Nancy's pants that it bunched up his shirt sleeve. How deep is his hand? Danny wondered.

He explored more of the pictures. He didn't have a complete storyboard; a few shots later, they had left the gazebo, and Howard's hands were back out in the open.

But wait ... there was another photo where Nancy was a step up on the gazebo steps, and Howard was holding her face to kiss her. And the picture right before it -- his fingers are right at Nancy's nose. Was it the same hand? It was.

Danny laughed. How did he not see it? Howard had spent half the photo shoot with his hand down his wife's pants, his fingers touching her pussy. It must have been. And then she smelled his fingers. Look at the smile on her face. She's into it. Danny clicked forward another picture, there was the hands on the face, kissing on the gazebo steps. The next one -- she looked at the camera, looked at Danny.

He tried to read the facial expression. This was a few moments after she had smelled her own pussy on her husband's fingers, and a single moment after kissing him, and then she glanced to the camera. Her eyes twinkled with a knowing smile. Danny didn't remember her flirting with him at all, so maybe he just happened to catch the middle of a different moment. But in this singular picture, her eyes said, he just fingered my pussy and then put his fingers near my mouth and I am hot and turned on and I want the camera to know it.

Danny stared at the picture for a while. Nancy's eyes were rust-colored, her skin tanned from the sun, a few freckles dotting her nose and forehead. She was in her late 20s, and until seeing this photo, Danny would never have referred to her as "sexy." But in this picture, she had a story to tell.

Danny clicked through the rest of the reel, but didn't find anything notable, nothing that either verified or invalidated his fantasy of Nancy's knowing look from the gazebo. He scrolled back to that one photo. It was the only one where she made eye contact with the camera, the only one where her vibe said, I know you're taking my picture.

This wasn't the first time Danny had fixated on a single picture from a shoot. He never really got to know his clients, just enough conversation to come up with a quality location, and to get a sense of what kind of package they were looking for.

Even when he shot solo models, he made it a point not to pursue the women. Mixing work and life was a bad idea. Of course, he was single, and had been for a while, so even if it was a bad idea, maybe it was the only way to go. After all, some of the women he shot were really attractive.

He sighed. Of course, the truth was that he often focused on individual pictures rather than actually knowing the whole person. Like Nancy. He could tell from the shoot that she wasn't the kind of woman he'd be into -- but this one picture told a very different story. Her eyes, her knowing eyes, the slight squint at her crow's feet, the minuscule arch of her eyebrow. So much action in one frame.

If I ever become one of those photographers who keeps a gallery of favorite pictures somewhere, this could be the centerpiece.