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What malarky:----A good photograph is a work of art with whatever "axe" was used. Maybe you find your mirrorless more "versatile" to your liking and skills, but that has noting to do with making a photo good. Nor the pixel peeping as they like to call pixel counting in UHH. m4/3ds and even phone cameras can make good photos and and high resolution ones with good shadow and highlight detail as well. And lastly ---mastering PhotoShop has nothing at all to do with a good photo. In fact it is detrimental to good reproduction--adding more variables where they are not needed, creating a synthetic look which most would consider---ugly.--------------------ew

His lecture and slide show was excellent. Some of the stories he had to go with his images of how he found the subjects, shot the image and processed in the darkroom had the students at UCLA on the edge of their seats with a few cheers thrown in.

A guy who ran the camera store where I bought all my stuff, including for use in the classroom in the part of LA where I lived and taught at the local high school at the time gave me the ticket, a friend of his at UCLA had sent him a dozen to give out to his customers.
That guy's store was only 3 blocks away, he was my "go to" for help and advice. When I walked in the shop the day after he got the tickets, he handed me the first one he gave out.

That was the year I taught 5 periods of Basic Photography on an emergency basis when the Photo Teacher got promoted to be an administrator only three days before the Fall Semester started, and no more photo teachers were available in the Los Angeles District hiring pool. But it was my hobby and I knew enough to teach Basic. So they broke up my history classes and scattered the kids to other teachers, and I became the Photo Teacher for one year. The Principal renamed the class "History and Practice of Photography" so he could justify having a credentialed history teacher take over the class.
That was pretty much a fun year. I did have a guy forced into one of the classes to get "art" credits to graduate. He was a discipline problem and had flunked two other art classes, and none of the art teachers would take him in a class. All the other students were there because they wanted to be. A lot different from a room where 1/3 of the kids hated taking history, but it was a required class for graduation.
Oh, that kid's Dad was a Lt of Detectives with LAPD, and he thought because his Dad was a big shot cop he could do anything and get away with it. The day I caught him smoking in the darkroom and the Principal and Boys Dean (the former photo teacher) called his father in for a conference, he found out he was wrong. He was almost an angel the rest of the year because his Dad told him if he got in trouble one more time, he was off to a private Military High School with a reputation for "fixing" problem students.

What a splendid opportunity, to be handed a ticket for the lecture wuthout having to jump through hoops.
That must have been an occasion that greatly impacted the lives of at least a few of the students, too, made very memorable through the way Ansel connected with them and held their attention.

There is a level where I really sense a twinge of envy and ...regret??, maybe... that I will not have opportunities for something akin to that. See, living in an area like the LA basin, where events like that are likely to occur, is not something I will be attracted to.
People who were raised or live there, or in other metropolis areas, may not understand. Some of us, though, totally unacquainted with and not wanting to live in that kind of human population density area, will not find ourselves in the right place - right time for those kinds of things. Not that we will feel neglected, not at all...just aware that there is a "trade-off" that goes along with being residents of open spaces with good elbow room.

Your experience of teaching school in a school system within that highly populated area, sounds like it was a rewarding time for you. Not everyone can just grab hold of that kind of opening in a situation like that, and turn it into a success....unruly police kid brat and all.

It took me a while to get used to the metro area. My hometown in Western Kentucky was only 1100 at its biggest and is now about 800 or so. I also spent a lot of time outside town on my Grandparent's farm when I was small. The house with a few remodels had been built during the Civil War to replace one that started as a log cabin in 1791. Granddad passed when I was in 8th grade and while I was in Vietnam in 66-67 Grandma got tired of the hassle of dealing with other farmers raising the crops on shares (and she was in her late 70s by then) sold the farm in 67 and bought a house in town next to her brother and across the street from her sister. That house had been built before WW I.

I first moved to the LA area in 1965 and lived with my Mom and Stepfather for about 9 months before I went into the Army and off to Vietnam.
I came back, got my credentials and a job with LAUSD, retired after over 30 years and just never left. Just changed towns and houses. For a few years my wife who was born and raised in East LA and Huntington Park did talk about buying a house in my hometown and moving when I retired. So I took her and the two younger kids on vacation in 2005, two years before I retired, and well, that talk stopped. There was one small market in town, 25 miles to Paducah Kentucky with the nearest large shopping centers like she was used to.
Then, when I drove them around town and out into the country past the old family farm Jasmine, who was nine, asked "Where are the buildings and sidewalks?" And you should have seen the kids' faces when I took them on a drive through the river bottoms along the Ohio with rafts of ducks and geese in the lakes and ponds, heavy hardwood forest between the cleared farm land and hordes of deer eating the harvest leftovers in the large farm fields along the roads.
I think Debra and the kids thought I had taken them through a time/dimensional warp to the frontier days of another universe.

Wow!!
You have held on quite well and survived like a champ, living that long like a fish out of water!
Not too sure everyone could adapt to that much of a drastic difference in living environment, on a long term basis.

Reactions of your women folk to the grandeur of rural, maybe secluded, surroundings brought a little chuckle. I can kind of see how that could be as big a shock to them - in "reverse" - as it was to me the first time I had to enter (not by my choice) the environs of an area where the population of people was arranged as much or more vertically as it was horizontally.
I've had to go into the LA basin a couple or three times, also, (thankfully, not for any long periods of time), and a difference between it and some of the other unavoidable metropolis area experiences, is that at least the LA area is more spread out horizontally rather than being mostly constructed in a vertically compacted cluster.

You know, this just ran through my memory:
Overheard a few people on one occasion talking over the saying, "you can take a boy out of the country, but no guarantee you can get the country out of the boy." One of the little group looked over my direction and remarked, "well, there may be some boys you'll never successfully even take out of the country."

I totally understand. I can settle down just about anywhere and not be bothered much. Give me a good book and leave me alone to start reading, and in a minute I can be anywhere in creation that is in that book.
Debra and the kids did get to enjoying the countryside, especially when I took them back for Christmas a couple of years later. There was snow! Though I think the biggest hit was the Airport Hilton in St Louis when we visited my Dad, Stepmom and half Brother. The Hilton had a very large indoor heated pool and I thought Jasmine was going to turn into a Mermaid she was in it so much.

Now if I could win a big lottery (Hmm, you have to buy tickets, oh well) I could buy a house back there and afford to fly etc. back and forth enjoying each place in turn during the year.