JimFormation

This evening I found myself rummaging through photographer Jill Greenberg’s stunning portfolio. Greenberg certainly doesn’t need me pimping her — whether we know it or not, we’ve all seen her work.

I was first taken with absolute control over light and recalled an old photography lesson:

I forget his name. He was so old that he appeared shrunken inside his crumpled suit. He was a photographer and took photos as a soldier during World War II, the Pacific.

I wandered through his small exhibition at the clubhouse of one of my companies senior apartment buildings. He lived there.

I struck up a conversation with him and eventually ended up in his apartment looking at photographs that didn’t make the wall. We talked about a lot of things, but mostly photography.

I began to ask about settings he would use in different situations. Aperture. Shutter speed. Exposure values. f-stop. Metering. I pulled out every photography word I could think of. I was trying to impress.

“Hold on, son,” the old man said. “You can’t worry about such things. Either you have light, or you don’t.”

Lesson over.