MARCHING OUT OF THE MURK

“We had the TOOLS, we had the TALENT!”——Ghostbusters (1984)

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THE CRY OF VICTORY BY EGON AND COMPANY when the dreaded Sta-Puf Marshmallow Man was defeated could easily be the enthusiastic “Yes!” uttered by many a photographer, once a stubborn technical problem has finally been solved and something like a usable picture results. The struggle is real, and it’s often just as sloppy and gooey as slaying a giant s’more. Being unable to nail an image through a failure of either ability or gear(or both) is as haunting as, dare I say it, a ghost, and exorcising the little sucker can be a true thrill.

One of the personal ghosts inhabiting my brain since 2011 was born the first time I stepped inside the legendary Hotel del Coronado, the lush 1880’s vacation spot in San Diego that stood in for a Florida resort in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959). The brilliant sunshine found just outside, on the joint’s sun porch, becomes a dim memory as soon as you step inside the lobby’s dark, wooded depths, a real catacomb of deeeeep shadow where light (and far too many photographs) goes to die. One look at my first attempt to extract something out of the murk, way back then, tells it all. The camera was a Nikon D60, a basic entry-level DSLR with a 10mp crop sensor and a fairly low ceiling for ISO. Exhibit “A”:

2011: Hotel del Coronado, San Diego, CA. f/2.2, 75mm, 1/60s., ISO 400. Shot on full auto.

Yeah, painful, innit? Now, jump forward about four cameras and fourteen years to my Nikon Z5 full-frame mirrorless, and, well, we almost have a fighting chance. Exhibit “B”:

Returning to the scene of the crime in 2025, and shooting manually. f/2.8, 28mm, 1/250s., ISO 2500.

Certainly, to extend the Ghostbuster metaphor, the “tools” are different; technology marches on. But the “talent”, if that’s not too obnoxious a word, has moved forward a bit as well. I am quite literally not the same photographer I was then, which makes sense, because I only had one direction I could go. If I still couldn’t make this picture by now, I should be spending my time planting zinnia seeds in the back yard or something. So what’s the pitch here? Something on the order of the old saw “never stop shooting”. It’s a musty, dusty, hackneyed slogan, but it just happens to be true. Make it til you make it right.