And then she’d killed herself.
I shiver. “I really don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I say.
He doesn’t acknowledge my words, but after a moment he speaks again. “I thought I knew a bit about photography, but I guess I know less than I thought. I always assumed some light was allowed in.”
I glance sideways at him, grateful for his discretion. He’s stepped away from my personal issues with the dark, but kept the thread of our original conversation. “At a certain point in the process, yes,” I say, letting my fears and memories fade under the weight of a subject I love. “And a red or amber safelight is common when making black and white prints because most of the papers are sensitive only to blue or blue-green light. But if you’re working with color like I usually do, then the prints need to be kept in total darkness until they’re properly fixed.”
I shrug. “It’s really not a big deal. Access to a darkroom is expensive and doing your own developing eats up a lot of time. One of these days I’ll get a digital camera, but in the meantime, I send my film out and get back a contact sheet along with all the pictures on disk. Then I sit down and play with the images in my native environment.”
“The computer?” he asks, grinning.
“Ever since I got my first one at age ten,” I confirm. I don’t tell him that the computer was my escape. I could turn it on and tell my mother I was doing homework, then lose myself in games and later in writing my own code. For a week or so, I’d even used the screen as a nightlight, but my mother caught on. My mother never missed a thing.
“Doing photographic work on the computer is like holding magic in your hand,” I say. “I mean, I could take a picture of you and then find stock footage of the surface of the moon and make it look like you’re standing in space.” I grin wickedly. “Or I could put your head on the body of monkey.”
“I’m not sure that would show me off to my best advantage.”
I have to agree. “No, it wouldn’t.”
“That’s one of the apps you have for sale, isn’t it?” he asks.
I blink, surprised he knows about that. I’ve designed, coded, and am selling three smartphone apps across various platforms. I designed them while I was at UT, though not for any particular class. Turns out there’s actually a market for apps that allow you to paste a headshot onto a provided stock animal photo, then share the new image across various social media.
“How did you know about that?” I ask. That app is reasonably popular, but it’s not bringing in so much money that it would be on Stark’s radar.
“I make it a point to know everything I can about the things I care about.” He’s looking at me as he speaks, and there’s no mistaking that he means me and not the app. I don’t know why I’m surprised. Damien never misses a thing, either.
I smile, feeling flattered but also exposed. I can’t help but wonder what other things he knows about me. How deep has he looked? Considering the resources at Damien Stark’s disposal, he could have looked pretty damn deep, and that truism gives me pause.
If he notices my mood this time, he ignores it. “I’ve always thought of science as magic, too,” he says, returning to the thread of our conversation. “Though not just computer science.”
“I was pretty impressed with your questions during the pitch,” I say. His questions had covered the technical aspects of the software design as well as the anatomical components, reflecting an understanding of both tech and basic anatomy. “What did you study in college?”