I grew up in photography with Milton Rogerson as my mentor. Milton, a veteran WWII combat paratrooper who became a journalist after the war, spent years inspiring me to do the right things with a camera and an enlarger in the darkroom to make the best black & white photographic print possible.

Milton introduced me to the work of Alfred Eisenstadt, the Father of Modern Photojournalism. Striving to capture images with impact was half the game. The other half came in the darkroom.

When digital photography made its debut, I expected people like Eisenstadt to be condescending toward it. In one of his last interviews before his death, he heralded digital photography as the greatest thing for photo-journalism he had seen in his lifetime.

I, on the other hand, was a hold-out. I had spent more than three decades trying to make good prints in a darkroom. Digital photography was heresy to me. I moved back to my native Pamlico County in 1996 striving to be, in my own silly mind, the Ansel Adams of coastal North Carolina.

Along came the greatest career opportunity of my lifetime, the chance to produce documentary photography in journalistic style for the restoration of The American Tobacco Historic District.

I purchased a large utility wagon from Lowe's and carried just about every film camera I owned with me to Durham once each week. Odd thing though. To get these images on the website, they had to be converted to digital format.

I lived with that during the summer. Then along came Hurricane Isabel, destroying my darkroom. As the saying goes, "Think fast."

I knew I could let nothing interfere with such a great opportunity as the one I had documenting the historic work in Durham. I did the unthinkable. I purchased a digital SLR camera.

I don't yet have good software for tweaking and sizing the images, but I now more fully understand why Alfred Eisenstadt was such a great photographer. He understood that the film used was not as important as the image produced.

I have rebuilt a serviceable darkroom for my artistic interest in seeing a print develop in a tray, a mystery and marvel to me after decades of seeing it over and over.

What's this have to do with elevators?

Pictured above is the electrical control panel of the elevator used in the last century in Bay 11 of the Washington Building on the campus of the American Tobacco Company.

Life goes on. Some things simply have to change. I'm working hard to see that the right things change in my endeavors.

One thing is for sure. The endeavor to change the decaying structures of the old American Tobacco Company in Downtown Durham is a right change to make.