The Stand-In Photographer

With one knee on the ground, I watched as his hands tweaked the shutter on his Fujifilm DSLR and removed one lens for another. His slender fingers were deft and nimble with experience, almost like clockwork.

He was a portrait photographer for powerful people and I was his subject. I am pretty powerful at swiping my credit card, but he wasn't taking my stills for that reason unfortunately. I had paid for a photographer on Airtasker to take shots for my LinkedIn and something for my grandmother's photo wall. However, the original kid I bought out caught Covid and his brother came instead.

He asked me to sit on a stool facing him behind the studio lights. He turned around and I noticed he had wide shoulders and a broad back.

I wondered what it would be like to run my hands underneath his faded denim button-down, under the white tee, unbuckle his belt and... and then he asked me how my day was.

He eases his subjects with friendly conversation and lulls them into a sense of security and the shutter clicks and you know he's doing it, a good job.

He anticipates what I want to say by predicting my answers based on my expressions to keywords he drops. I should be scared of his intelligence, but I'm not.

"How do you know so much about me?" I asked a little suspicious, a bit curious and flattered all in three.

"I try to understand my subjects. I can gauge what kind of person you are, what you like and the company you keep based on your social media.”

"What has my social media told you?"

Although his eyes were hiding behind the viewfinder, they couldn't betray his tongue licking his bottom lip. Nor the way his hands trembled slightly at my question.

"You tend to overshare. You have niche taste for the kitsch. You're close with your friends”. He paused and enunciated low and slow, "and you're a pretty girl."

Pretty accurate, he just missed my penchant for the sultry.