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Flash forward 10 years (pardon the pun). After photo-documenting numerous soccer games; track and cross-country meets; family events and weekends in the Catskill Mountains; and trips to London, Paris, Charleston, Savannah, and Iceland (among other places) I was still in Auto mode and certainly no closer to creating anything more than a decent snapshot. I still had an eye for composition and it was growing more astute and, dare I say it, artistic; but my photographs still lacked any depth.

Recognizing that I needed help and a fair amount of direction I looked for a class I could take. I can’t remember what Google search I did, but I was ultimately very lucky to find Mindy Veissid at “The Art of Intuitive Photography” and a class on digital photography basics. That first several hour session taught me the principles of the exposure triangle and what some of those mysterious dials and settings really did on my camera. Mindy demystified the technical terms and encouraged us to play with aperture and depth of field and to see what happened when we slowed the shutter way down. Compensating for the loss (or gain) of light through adjustments to ISO began to make a bit more sense. Yeah the results were messy, but they were neat! And it opened up a whole new way of thinking of my camera as an eye on the world.

I had originally planned a double-session on that weekend day. Digital basics in the morning followed by a “walkabout” at Grand Central Terminal in the afternoon. Mindy had a reassuring tone and a gentle approach that emphasized exploration. Don’t worry about getting it “right.” Think about what you can see and how you can tell a story. We practiced different techniques at Grand Central and thought about seeing this place through different lenses. What would it feel like to a child in a stroller or an alien descending from the stars to see the myriad colors and textures to be found everywhere you looked. I turned off auto-focus and played with moving the camera while the shutter was open. I did lots of things BUT shoot in Auto mode. 

The shot above is from that day and remains a favorite of sorts. Yeah the composition is meh,  the exposure is all over the place, and the degree of shake in the camera would make you dizzy if you looked at it long enough. But to me it tells a story of arrival and waiting and of experiencing the grand architecture and the light that pours into the main space. And it was full of motion, just like Grand Central can be. I took another shot, below, that I thought of as the ghosts of Grand Central – all the spirits of nearly 100 years of commuters pouring down the ramps from 42nd Street.

My first “as shot” exposures were very dark from that day. I think it was more than just the effects of the late afternoon November sun. Mindy even suggested my camera had a “dark side.” Since I hadn’t yet begun to play with post-processing with image editing software, I had to accept that my shot was kinda yellow and kinda dark. They reminded me of the photos that my father used to shoot on 400 ISO film with a point-and-shoot Olympus. He had hundreds of yellow photos of dinner parties and medical conferences. You could tell who was who, but no one really looked that good in those photos. Later, with the benefit of Aperture then Adobe Lightroom, I began to see all of the great things I could do with editing. These photos had some significant work done to bring back the tones and reduce the highlights that had gotten over-blown when my shutter was open for so long.

Nevertheless, the camera had a “dark side” and I happened to be going back out to Kansas for a Christmas visit. So a side-trip to Wolff’s Camera in Topeka was on my agenda to pick up a new Nikon D7100 body. Since I already had the kit lens for the D70 I decided to save myself some money and just replace the body. But I remember those several days waiting to get back to New York to attach the lens to the new body to give the D7100 a go. That was a long wait, but well worth it.