The Fire Escape Cooperated

July ninth. I had a whole internal debate about the parking meter. I want to be honest about that. We were halfway down the block, Simone had asked if I wanted to walk over to the farmer's market with her, just to walk, no agenda, and I had the camera with me because I'd grabbed it off the shelf on the way out the door without really deciding to, the way you grab a reusable bag you might not need, and I stopped in front of a parking meter and stood there looking at it for long enough that Simone said, out loud, 'please don't.' I didn't.

The fire escape was across the street from the meter and it was doing what fire escapes do in July: holding heat and shadow in a pattern of rectangles, zig-zagging up the side of the building in a way that was just interesting enough. I lifted the camera and I didn't really know what I was doing, the workshop covered settings and light and the logic of a frame, but it didn't cover the specific sensation of standing on a public sidewalk pointing a camera at a building while a stranger exits a bodega three doors down and you try to look like someone who knows what they're doing. I pressed the shutter anyway. Twice, I think. Then I looked at the back of the screen for a while.

reviewing the take, not sure about the take

Simone asked how it came out. I said I wasn't sure yet. She said that was probably fine. We kept walking.

Later, near the end of the block, she propped my phone on a low brick ledge and got us both in it, and I told her about the parking meter negotiation, and she laughed the way she laughs when something is genuinely funny but she also called it, and I was grinning in the embarrassed way you grin when you know you're being teased and you also deserve it. The camera was still around my neck.

the parking meter was not the subject, it turns out

The fire escape photograph is technically in focus. Whether it's any good is a different question, which is, I think, how you end up going back outside.