Tech Amuck: Photo Shoot in a Flash

 

 

The flash on my camera went off, shutter firing rapidly and unexpectedly. I wasn’t even looking at the time. Shouldn’t have been possible for it to happen in this day and age, but it did. My attention went to my camera first to spot the problem, then to my clients to apologize for the blinding light. I paused. The set had been dressed up for the Morgan’s father and son photo shoot. The two had sat in the chair together for the first pose. But now, my backdrop for the photo shoot was gone and so were my clients. In their place was the bare wall and two men in their underwear. I wondered if I had had a stroke.

The man sitting in the chair where Mr. Morgan had been, pulled down the underwear of the man in his lap. This was much more intimate than I had ever shot. I slowly walked back out to my front desk to check the scheduling list. In my personal notes, I had the Morgans listed as husbands, not father and son. Same names, just different ages. What a weird mix up? Did my brain space out when taking information? I put my head up and some of my pictures around my place were different. My landscapes and achievements were there, but less wholesome ones, more artistic nudity. Men in nature, asses out. Men tied up sexually. Men in the throes of love.

I could tell it was certainly my taste based on the camera’s gaze and focus, but I genuinely had no knowledge of it. Had I slipped into an alternate world?

I walked back to the set, the two hadn't even noticed I had left. Though confused. I did the shoot. I mean, we all got to eat. But as I took pictures, I got a better look at them. The stranger in the man’s lap had a striking resemblance to the son from earlier, except layered with a ton of muscles and a mustache. As for the guy on bottom, he did look like the original Mr. Morgan I talked to, albeit slightly younger.

After the shoot, I shifted through the photos, just as one last personal review, force of habit type thing. I got to the first picture of the collection and I don’t know why, but I went back one more time. There was a photo of the Morgan husbands during the flash. I went back again, another photo with the flash. Speeding through, all the shots my camera had taken during the flash, played in reverse. Oddly at the end (or start?) was a picture of Mr. Morgan and his son as I had asked them to sit. I scrolled forward through the pictures. Snapshots of time caught the son, tearing through his clothes, weight heavier on his dad’s lap as his toes reached the floor. The fabric from his clothes faded into nothing. Meanwhile, Mr. Morgan’s body told a different story. The few gray hairs he had vanished as his body firmed up and two sets of pecs from the men collided with each other. All clothes, gone, but their briefs, now reshaped for all the muscle they contained. I ran through it forward and backward, stunned. Like watching a time lapse video of something that should have been impossible.

If I sent it over with the rest of the photos, would that be a good reason to charge extra?