This is a big day for my photography.

My Leica teacher comes across as sweet and gentle, but this is just a mask. He is a hard ass, and for the first time in many years, I have homework to do every night. And for the first time, I’m doing it.

Older people tend to squeal all the time about “young people today” being inferior to us when we were young.

That is not my experience. I know many young men and women, including Donald and my daughter, who humble me by being more intelligent than I am.

Donald is a fine teacher, and I respect him partly because I get no free rides and because he is helping me understand that if I want to grow and shine as a photographer, I will get off my high horse and do some grinding groundwork.

He gets me, good and bad, and knows how to get through to me.

He overnighted me this excellent tripod because it is light, easy to use, and portable. He told me to bring it wherever I go, set it up, experiment with my aperture and shutter speeds, and then, with my ISO and other settings in a few weeks.

We will meet in two weeks online to go over the results; then, in May, I’ll go to Boston to meet with him in person and go out to take some photos together.

The plan is to know more about what I am doing by then. After that, no excuses.

I’ve become very fond of Donald, even though he is about half a century younger than I am. But it feels like I have known him forever; we were instantly comfortable with one another.

He feels I need to use the tripod a lot more than I am now to get the kind of photos I want to take, and I already see that this is good advice. The clarity is intense, the depth of field is very, the detail is breathtaking. There is little of the handshake with a tripod that comes whenever humans take a photograph.

Without that, the camera is free to do a better job. I won’t use the tripod every time, but I will use it a lot. And I’m grasping how to balance aperture and shutter speed. Next comes ISO.

The photo above, of Maria throwing the ball for Fate, is the first tripod photo and a good one to play around with.

Fate moves like a rocket, and I wanted to catch her movement without fuzzing up the picture. With a tripod, I could do it.

Without it, I couldn’t. I fiddled with the shutter speed a dozen times but found the setting I wanted for shots like that in the sunlight.

I’ve been out all afternoon to sit and write and read and think for a bit. I have a lot to absorb.