SCENE OF THE CRIME

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHY IS ONE OF THE ONLY AREAS OF MY LIFE in which I am never, ever really finished. Job over? No more visits back to see the old office gang. I’m gone. Move to another city? Lose my number. I won’t be back this way again.

10:0739am, 9/16/07 on a Sony DSC-W5; f/5.6, 7.9mm, ISO 100, 1/200 sec.

But making a picture of something just once, and leaving it at that? No, let’s think more in terms of a carousel. Miss the brass ring on one revolution? Get ready to grab for it on the next go-round. That landscape could be just a little stronger. That skyline could be improved by another try (or another three dozen tries, if I’m honest). It’s sad, but true; there aren’t but a few of the images I’ve made over a lifetime that I don’t imagine might be improved by a do-over.

That point was driven home to me again recently when I found myself walking past the precise spot in New York City where, in 2007, I first attempted a shot of the 30 Rock tower, the anchor of Rockefeller Plaza and pretty much on the bucket list of any visitor to The Apple. The original shot was passable, i.e., not truly embarrassing, and I even had an enlargement of it hanging in my workroom for more than a decade, having told myself that the image, basically a snap from a Sony Cybershot in full auto mode, was pretty much a home run.

11:0419a, 10/14/24 on a Nikon Z5; f/9, 28mm, ISO 100, 1/500 sec.

Zoom forward to two months ago, when, once more, I was standing along the southern side of Saks Fifth Avenue on East 49th Street looking across Fifth Avenue at the entrance to one of the two lesser plaza buildings that stand a block in front of the main tower. Even though I was now using a full-frame mirrorless Nikon Z5 with about a billion more options built into it, I shot the picture fast, just as I had done it in ’07. Later, I was struck at how many differences I saw in the two quickie snaps, fourteen years apart from each other.

Most noticeably, I had positioned myself much closer to Fifth Avenue in the re-do, eliminating the huge black block created in the original by the shadowy side of Saks, thus revealing more of the target. This closer framing also got rid of the light pole in the ’07 shot, which is either “urban atmosphere” or clutter, depending on your viewpoint. Of course, the Nikon is far more capable of delivering more nuanced color than the ancient Sony, and the custom settings I had dialed in to an assigned aperture priority button also helped deliver a wider overall range of tones than the earlier camera could ever dream of.

As to any other key differences, the verdict is yours as to what worked better when. I did not take the recent shot with a deliberate mission in mind; that is to say, I was not so much trying to consciously improve on the original, wanting instead to shoot the new frame quickly and instinctively, as I had done back in 2007, allowing whatever changed instincts I had accrued over the intervening years to dominate over any intentional calculation. It thus stands as a fairly honest testament as to the evolution of my style, or changes in how I “pre-see” a picture. Who knows? I may revisit the scene again in 2041, perhaps as the Ghost of Snapshots Past.