The kid saw the man with the camera while walking down the beach at night. He was under the pier, peering through his viewfinder toward a perspective vanishing point of floodlit crossed pilings, like the infinitely receding reflections in opposed mirrors. The camera looked expensive, a big professional rig all trimmed out in black and silver, covered with buttons and numbers.

“Have you got enough light to take a picture, mister? Even with all those lights on the water, its pretty dark out.”

“It’s a tough shot, but if I stop up and go with a long exposure I think I can get it. I just have to make sure I’m standing so all the floods are behind a piling so they don’t overexpose and make sure I hold the camera perfectly still”.

The kid asked him what that meant, and the photographer patiently explained about shutter and aperture, film speed and time exposure. His own Kodak was just a snapshot taker, it had no adjustments and worked only in bright sunlight. He had no idea that some cameras had control of these factors. His questions must have pleased the photographer, because after he got his shot they walked down the beach together talking about photography, and the man seemed delighted at the child’s enthusiasm and curiosity.

“I saw an article in Life magazine about a photographer who cut out a dead sheep’s eye and used it to take pictures with.”

“Oh yeah, Roman Vishniac. He’s always doing things like that. I can’t imagine how he gets away with it, or why the public’s so fascinated by his idiotic stunts. There’s a perfectly good lens in an eyeball, so what does that prove? The one in my Nikon is better. Photography is to show how things look, not how they should look. And certainly not how they look to a sheep.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Photography is not art. It’s journalism, it’s history. If you want to make pretty pictures, do it the right way by drawing and painting. That takes artistic skill, photography is science.”

“Then why were you taking that picture under the pier?”

The man stopped walking, looked at the boy and smiled. He patiently explained he enjoyed taking pretty pictures as much as the next guy, especially if they posed a technical challenge, and he had a house full of his own snapshots and portraits and landscapes. But real photography was about recording the truth, it should have no editorial content, no personal opinion. It was up to the viewer to provide that, not the photographer’s job to persuade him.

“So what kind of pictures do you take?”

“I work at a hospital. I photograph medical specimens, diseased organs; tumors and cancers that have been surgically removed from patients and from dead people.”

“Ewwwww.”

“”Oh, it’s not pretty. But it helps doctors learn about diseases, so it helps people. The most important thing is that the photograph be accurate, that the photograph looks exactly like the tissue. Otherwise, it isn’t much use to the doctor.”

“Why don’t you use color film.”

“I do. But color film isn’t manufactured to give you the right colors. The film chemistry is designed to give you pretty colors. People don’t buy film that shows the true colors of things, the pictures look dull and uninteresting, so film emulsions are formulated to exaggerate and diminish certain hues to make the pictures more interesting. Especially the flesh tones. Most people don’t want to be reminded of what Aunt Martha REALLY looks like.”

“So what do you do?”

“I have to use special lighting and filters, and I fiddle with the developing chemistry. I experiment a lot, so I get the colors right. I also use a special film manufactured in Germany that works really well for what I do. In fact, that German company has gone out of business, so I’ve bought all of their film I could find and I’ve got it in my freezer at home. I don’t know what I’m going to do when it all runs out.”

The boy realized it was getting late, and he was far from home, so he shook the man’s hand, said good night, and they parted. They never saw each other again, but the man had changed the boys’s life forever. He wasn’t sure he believed everything the man said, but he could see why the man felt the way he did, and that was even more important.