The Boy has been showing an interest in photography from time to time. It’s not an everyday thing, but he enjoys it when I give him the little Fuji to shoot with.

This afternoon, we went out on a photo walk, and he asked me if it would be possible for him to edit some of the photos in Paint.net, a free editing program that I use for quick things like cropping screenshots and the like. I’d taught him how to do gradient overlays with it, and he loved the idea of editing photos like that.

“Do you use Paint.net for your photos?” he asked.

“No, I use Lightroom.”

“Can you put gradients on pictures in Lightroom?”

Technically, yes, I thought, but not the way he was thinking. “Not really, but you can in Photoshop.”

“Can you teach me how to do it in Photoshop?” The Boy loves to learn if it’s something he’s interested in — but then, doesn’t that describe us all?

“Well, for what you were doing, it’s probably best just to keep using Paint.net.”

“Can you teach me to use Lightroom?” he pressed.

And I thought, sure. That’s entirely possible. There’s a lot less to overwhelm initially on Lightroom, and to be honest, it’s a less powerful program in a lot of ways: there’s nothing you can do in Lightroom that you can’t do in Photoshop, but there’s tons you can do in Photoshop that you can’t do in Lightroom. Still, for most photo editing, bringing Photoshop into the picture is like using a backhoe for gardening.

So when we go home, I installed Lightroom on the computer we have upstairs, and we’ll start editing tomorrow.

Will he love it? At first, most definitely. I look forward to sharing some of his edited images.

Will he stick with it? We’ll see. But seeing how much he loves trying to copy me, I think there’s a good chance we might begin something long-lasting tomorrow.

Editing isn’t the only thing we’ll be starting tomorrow. Spring break is now over, so we’ll all head back “to school.” I have real reservations about the ultimate efficacy of what I’m doing with students. Are they learning? I doubt it. Are they slipping? I hope not — that’s really the only hope most of us educators have.