Bill and I set out exceedingly early one Saturday to visit a flea market far out in the country and sell a couple of black powder long guns. He used to collect them, but got tired of pouring powder or biting cartridges or whatever the obsolete operating system was.
I was wanting to photograph some vintage earrings for sale. Jewelry is a real challenge for the amateur product photographer because it’s small, it’s shiny, and you want the pictures to be very focused and detailed. And beyond that, you want them to be gorgeous, and three-dimensional, and to look so real that the viewer will fall in love with the earrings at once and cash in her kids’ college funds to possess them.
Now, Bill has never been afraid of snakes. Family lore has it that as a boy he went on missions to clean water moccasins out of the swimming hole. He would lay out fishhooks and lines on the bank to capture them, and then string the trophies together to impress the other kids.
I only heard of him bringing a snake into the house once. It was a copperhead in a jar. He’d decided to keep it in his room. Luckily, his Dad found it before his Mom did. If it had been the other way around he’d have likely finished his childhood in military school.
