COLOR COMMENTARY?
A Day’s Work, 2022 (original color master shot)
By MICHAEL PERKINS
A PARTICULARLY MISCHIEVOUS FRIEND OF MINE, when asked by his small child why all older films and pictures seemed to be in monochrome, decided to tell the kid that the world simply was in black and white back in those days, as if the planet at some later point finally ripened and a fuller palette of hues became the New Normal. The con might have actually worked, if my friend’s child had not, in fact, been far more intelligent than his father.
Thing is, we still think of earlier photographs as defining a world of little or no color. We may logically know that this cannot be true, and yet, when we compare mono and early color snaps of the same subjects, or see the hues restored to pictures that were made in color but often printed in b&w, there is a bit of a disconnect. And even after all of that, we learn to either use or withhold color in our work based on our concept of which subject matter “deserves” it. For some shots, we think of monochrome as somehow more incisive, interpretative.
A Day’s Work, 2022 (mono conversion)
Those of us who study photo history are well aware of b&w’s emotive power to showcase things that are haunting, stark, spare. We carry the grayscale images of the Dust Bowl and the Depression in our minds, unsparing, grim testimonies to human suffering that are etched in monochrome. Does this mean that some subjects deserve a kind of reverse color commentary, that they will always be more effective with a narrower variety of tones?
The ragged farm workshop seen here is, itself, a re-creation, a deliberately staged tableau assembled inside an enormous desert arboretum, a tribute to bygone settler days. The color master shot certainly contains all the texture and contrast appropriate to the exhibit, but I am still slightly more drawn to the mono conversion. But why? Does it please me that it almost looks like a Walker Evans or Arnold Rothstein assignment for a New Deal agency? Does it become more “authentic”, and, if so, in what way? And being that I’m photographing a replica, is my choice of tonal range a replica as well? A well-meaning tribute? A cute fake?
Or, as Alfred says, “What, me worry?”
I keep posing these questions as if they have definitive answers, when, in fact, the only thing that makes a photograph valid is the feeling it conveys (or fails to convey). It’s fun to spin the various arguments around their generation, as if it’s important, but the one thing that “qualifies” a technique in a picture is whether it worked, whether or not it made a connection beyond the photographer himself. The rest is merely debate.
Things are not always black and white.
Except when they are.
THE INSTANT IT DOESN’T CLICK
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE POLAROID COMPANY’S DEATH/RESURRECTION SAGA OF THE 2010’s is the kind of Cinderella story that warms the heart and quickens the emotions among photographers of all ages. Culturally iconic but financially destitute camera company bellies up after 60 years! Plucky, artsy underdogs rescue legendary brand! Instant cameras are back! Admittedly, the return of the rainbow-banded square film in the white box has all the elements of a classic fairy tale.
Minus the happy ending.
Instead, the success of the reborn Polaroid, including its Life-Saver-Flavored cameras and its muy espensivo film, is more like the tale of what might have been, but isn’t, yet. The new Polaroid film is nowhere near the equal of the original formula, even though the New Owners get an A for effort for having to reverse-engineer it from scratch, after Old Polaroid dismantled the machinery and ate the recipe used for making it. They also deserve credit for at least partially reviving interest in older, better Polaroid cameras (the SX-70, as one example) by doing nuts-up restorations of them in order to stoke interest for the revived film.
And yet.
Them wuz the daze: Edwin Land’s first-ever Polaroid, the Model 95 (1948)
Over ten years into their quest, the re-booted Polaroid has yet to produce a camera that is much better than a glorified point-and-shoot, opting instead to merely celebrate the fond experience of producing an in-hand print quickly. As but one example, the marketing emphasis on their various “Duochrome” films (Red-and-white, Blue-and-White, even Green-and-White monochrome emulsions) is on the unexpected, the random. It’s basically the Lomography philospophy of “hey, this is so loose and free, ‘cuz we don’t know what will come out, if anything!”, an outlook which is novel for those who want their picture-taking to be an explosion of pure spontaneity rather than something that can be deliberately planned or predictably delivered. In their original incarnation, Polaroids were the stuff of serious art installations, a la the Andy Warhols of the world. Now they are soft, murky souvenirs of the last boho rave or teen sleepover you attended. It ain’t the same.
To be fair, other instant camera makers have produced units with features that give the shooter finer control over the results (including even baseline cameras from Instax.Fujifilm), and there is even a smaaaaalllll market for things like the 3d printing of instant camera backs which can be fitted onto high-end camera fronts, like that of the Mamiya RZ67. But the main highway of the instant pic market moves on the twin tracks of novelty and nostalgia, something Edwin Land never targeted directly during Polaroid’s original golden era.
Instant cameras are a blast. I like playing with them. But that play is ultimately frustrating and expensive. In its second life, the new Polaroid corporation has a long way to come before it earns the name it purports to honor. And if Mark Twain were alive today to compare the two instant eras, he might repeat his old phrase that they constitute “the difference between lightning…and the lightning bug”.
WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE? DEPENDS..
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE OLD ADAGE ABOUT LIFE BEING WHAT HAPPENS WHILE YOU’RE BUSY MAKING PLANS also seems like a perfect fit for the act of photography. Certainly we love to take bows for our best work, and to let the myth persist that what’s hanging on the wall is exactly what we were going after in the first place. Well, I use the word “myth”. I actually mean “convenient lie”.
The scientist in us loves to keep alive the belief that we are in charge of our lives, that all our great results are the inevitable outcome of brilliant foresight and faultless planning. But the photographer side of us, the more instinctual half of our nature, knows how much luck and randomness figure into the mix. Yes, we came back with a great shot of C, but only after our “perfect” concepts of A and B fell flat.
Several weeks ago, I went birding with a small group into a marshy area near Show Low, Arizona. The water was all part of a reclamation project that created the illusion of a large pond/small river in what is typically semi-desert, and the entire local landscape was transformed, because of the extra moisture, with reedy banks, plentiful supplies of yellow-headed and red-winged blackbirds, and, well, bugs. A bleeding swarm of infinitesimal insects which are a huge Happy meal for the flycatchers in the area, but which also fill the hair, eyes and mouths of any, well, non-birds in the area.
Which is where my plan A fell apart.
Yes, O logical side, we will, as expected, be taking pictures of shorebirds and the shores that host them. Easy call. But, oof, here comes the photographer side, the instinctual guy, who now wants to make a bug picture. But how? Everything is awash in early morning sun, which renders the swarm all but invisible. They are so thick that they may make even carefully focused pictures look soft, as if I had a diffusion filter attached to my lens. The only way, then, to at least suggest the look of the plague was to aim at the darkest thing I could find, which turned out to be a small copse of free-standing trees further inland from the water and standing in their own shade. At least I had enough of a picture to suggest my new, revised main message, to wit: man, there’s a &%$ton of bugs here.
And so it goes. Planner Me begins with a startup scheme. No-Plan Me eventually straggles with another viewpoint. And the eternal question of “who’s in charge here” for a given picture changes on a whim, or around whatever might be, sorry, bugging me at the moment.
OF ASTRONAUTS AND APERTURES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE VERY FIRST CAMERAS IN SPACE were not cutting-edge, ground-up tech crafted by NASA engineers, but the personal gear of the earliest astronauts, like John Glenn’s $40 Ansco Autoset in 1962 and Wally Schirra’s more sophisticated Hasselblad 500C a few years later. Taking documentary pictures in flight was originally little more than an afterthought, with the Canaveral gearheads gradually introducing more and more after-market modifications to make the pilots’ cameras perform more reliably in space. Hasselblad, in particular, was the closest thing to an official NASA camera from Mercury and Gemini missions clear up to the first Apollo moon landing in 1969, producing the iconic images we most associate with the space program.
With the first space shuttle flights in 1981, however, a shift to the 35mm format occurred, as Nikon became the dominant brand for the second phase of NASA’s first golden age. Dozens of mods were developed, transforming the company’s best prosumer film cameras into truly space-ready gear. More than half a dozen different models were reworked by the Nikon/Kennedy Center brain trust to answer challenges that were unique to zero-g, the bulkiness of astronaut gloves and helmets, or the punishing thermal extremes unique to life in orbit.
As an example, the Nikon F3, seen in the above magazine ad, saw, among its tweaks, a greatly enlarged viewfinder (since helmets prevented an astronaut from putting his eye right up against the camera) a detachable, heavy duty battery pack to automatically advance and rewind film (still an “add-on” feature for most cameras at the time), pre-loaded film magazines (capable of snapping up to 250 frames per roll) and early versions of both aperture priority and auto-focus (since early pictures taken by the astronauts were either underexposed or blurry). Other, less obvious fixes, like the removal of leatherette trim (the gases in the glue could leach out into the cabin air in weightless conditions) and the invention of a kind of pot-holder “space pouch” to encase the cameras so that they wouldn’t freeze during extra-vehicular activity, were also hatched. Several of NASA/Nikon’s key innovations were adapted later for general consumer cameras, while other workarounds, like the arbitrary redesigning of switches or the removal of reflective enamel, were of no value to John Q. Snapshooter.
Today, the shuttle-era Nikons are the subject of a great degree of study by engineers who value them for their ingenuity, as well as important links in the chain of photography’s onward advancement over time. They also fetch astronomical prices (sorry) at auction. Best of all, we have them. Unlike the Hasselblads that documented the Apollo missions (which had to be left on the lunar surface to counter the weight added to the cargo bays by the accumulation of moon rocks), the shuttle Nikons booked a round-trip ticket home.
BEARING WITNESS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IN READING A RECENT ARTICLE ON THE CHANGING PHOTOGRAPHIC TECHNOLOGY involved in covering conflicts in the 21st century, from satellites to cell phones to drones to surveillance video, my mind rolled back to the man that, in my younger years, defined not only what it was to be a war photojournalist, but, indeed, how I would specifically visualize the war in Vietnam….that is, through the eyes of a grunt on the ground with a camera. In the days when Life magazine was the premier photo-news weekly (in an era fairly crowded with such publications), Larry Burrows’ (1926-1971) covers and feature articles on all aspects of our tragically doomed crusade in Southeast Asia were the final word on how, if not why, the fight was being waged. His work was tragic, audacious, and strangely empathetic in a way heretofore unseen in combat journalism. He simply changed the terms of the conversation.
Burrows was already a seasoned veteran by the time Life sent him to Vietnam, having begun his career with the Associated Press in 1947, logging hundreds of thousands of miles in battle sites that included Suez, Lebanon, Cyprus and Central Africa, and earning a reputation for both incisive vision and daring among his peers. Moreover, he enjoyed respect across all grades and ranks of fighting men. Burrows was more than a mere reporter on America’s most troubled war; he was also something of an emotional interpreter, reading the ravaged faces and psyches of the men tasked with trying to extract the U.S. from a bottomless swamp of death. The image you see here, known to many editors as “Reaching Out”, reveals little purely military information, but profoundly nails the gut-wrenching realities of shared sacrifice and loyalty in a way that no written editorial or spoken protest could. And yet, Larry Burrows knocked off this kind of eloquence on a daily basis. Like any great photographer, he made it look effortless.
Burrows died in 1971 alongside fellow photojournalists Henri Huet (AP), Kent Potter (UPI), and Keisaburo Shimamoto (Newsweek) when their helicopter was shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. In remembering Larry, Life editor Ralph Graves said “I do not think it is demeaning to any other photographer in the world for me to say that Larry Burrows was the single bravest and most dedicated war photographer I know of.”
The group’s communal remains were buried underneath the Newseum building in Washington, D.C., where they remained until the facility, fallen on hard economic times, closed for good in 2019, at which time they were disinterred, and, at this writing, remain temporarily at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, awaiting a new and hopefully permanent burial place. Once more, Larry Burrows is on the ground, surrounded by the men and women who entrusted him with their stories.
ABOUT FACE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MANY PHOTOGRAPHS BEGIN AS ONE THING AND FINISH AS QUITE ANOTHER, there being many micro-phases, each mere parts of seconds in length, between conception and execution. We can be absolutely certain what we think we want at the start of the process, and just as certain, by the end of it, that we were wise to abandon our original plan.
The best test of whether we finally “got it right”, to my mind, is that the final image seems to be what I can only call inevitable; that is, once it’s been taken, it’s hard to imagine it having been done any other way. It’s similar to the reaction we sometimes get when we hear the original working title of a novel, or are told who else had been up for a key role in a now-classic movie…the “of course” moment.
Lots of visual information here. Too much, as it turns out…
The picture seen here was originally a story of scale, with the woman at left merely employed as a prop to help contextualize the sprawling space in a very wide shot, about 24mm. To be honest, I had originally taken almost no notice of her facial features (including the fact that she is quite strikingly beautiful), her body english, or any mood that she might be projecting. In fact, she is so much at the far end of the frame as to be Silly-Putty-stretched a bit by the lens. But at the time I was actually more interested in the play of light patterns playing through the ceiling and onto the tiles than the feelings she displayed.
With a radical crop, the woman’s more prominent placement makes the picture a better story.
Then I chimped the shot on my monitor and saw that face. A face suggesting a whole smorgasbord of feelings, from boredom to impatience to longing, to, well, you name it. Meaning that anything you could name is already suggested by that face: it’s what you bring to it, as well as what you can take from it that creates a bond between shooter and audience. Suddenly, the importance of everything else in the frame just fell away. The picture, from that point on, had to be about her. A severe crop gave me just enough context to her right to anchor her in time and space, but now she was the story, the reason for the frame. The final picture had become, in essence, inevitable.
Photography is a constant flow of critical choices, and none of the decisions I made for this picture in any way confers masterpiece status on it. But even in a medium-effective photo, there are ways to push the image toward a truer version of itself. It’s a game of inches.
THE MONTH I GOT MONO
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MY FIRST DAYS AS A PHOTOGRAPHER occurred just after color film had almost completely supplanted black and white for daily use. Certainly, many snapshots and news images were still shot on b/w, but, as my father was a slide shooter all the way, I cut my teeth on Kodachrome and Ektrachrome and what NBC used to call “living color”. I was also heavily influenced by View-Master travel reels and scenic mags like Arizona Highways, and so, again, not a lot for the mono side of my infant brain to feed upon.
Later on, as I educated myself on the Old Masters, I grew to appreciate grayscale at its finest, but still tended to shoot primarily in color, with the exception of the odd side project. With that in mind, it occurred to me recently that, while I had done several lengthy shooting walkabouts over the years in order to speed up my learning curve with various bits of gear, I had seldom, if ever, done a long stretch purely in black and white. A newly acquired camera seemed the perfect time to give myself mono for a month.
One thing which interested me in expanding my visualization in b&w was that the latest cameras can do so much more than just shoot “without color”. Grayscale can be so much more nuanced than merely the absence of hue, and today’s in-camera settings can allow more attenuation in contrast, sharpness and tone than was ever possible in the past. Another selling point was the ability of most recent full-function cameras to place a complete custom configuration of settings at your fingertips by, essentially “storing” them on a dial-able slot in the mode wheel (U1, U2, U3 modes for Nikon, C1, C2, C3 for Canon, and so forth) This allowed me to quickly shoot with both sides of my brain when needed, dialing between, say, manual mode (in full color), and a U1 mode pre-programmed with every little flavor ingredient I want in a mono shot.
The take-home is just this: the mere increase in ease of operation made me shoot more, and with greater enthusiasm, in black & white than I would typically ever do. With just a little prep, my eye got used to consistently composing for what mono does best, getting me used to thinking primarily in that particular tone palette. And, although I know that many prefer merely to take a master shot in color and convert it to mono later on at their whim, I believe that deliberately conceiving a grayscale shot in-camera is a distinctly different experience, one which is helped greatly with the use of electronic view-finders, which let you see precisely what the sensor sees.
Going forward, I will probably budget more mono shots into my overall output than I ever have before, all through the expedient of using the camera to, well, get out my own way. And, as I frequently assert, reducing the steps and hassle between conception and execution is the true superhighway to better pictures.
SCENE OF THE CRIME
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO TRAVEL FREQUENTLY FIND THEMSELVES DOING QUICKIE PIVOTS when it comes to tour destinations. Spontaneous choices to Check Out The Cliffs or Let’s Do The Ruins are often fed by group whims as well as by our own, the result being that you don’t always have the luxury of having the “perfect” lens on hand when you decide to hit someplace in the heat of the moment. And we all stipulate that, under such conditions, what we get, picture-wise, is what we get. In the words of the old hod-rod racers, you run what you brung.
And so, the other day, I found myself swept along with a small party to take in a lovely lake park near Show Low, Arizona, where the sunset was said to be marvelous. All reports were true, and fortunately I had along a very sold “Old Reliable”, my Nikkor 24mm f/2.8, a war-torn survivor from the ’70’s that’s built like a tank and is sharp as a diamond, and so, as you can see up top, you get pure loveliness with a minimum of adjustment or fuss. After several days’ practice, you could be in a coma and still come home with decent stuff.
However, I later suffered my usual bout of WhatMighta-ism and wondered what other glass could have given me a slightly dreamier quality. On our last morning before heading home, then, we took one more walking loop around the lake’s perimeter at the scene of the original crime, the aluminum walk-out fishing dock shown in the first image. This time I was sporting a Lensbaby Velvet 56, which models itself after some of the glamour portrait glass once popular in the golden days of Hollywood. The lens adds a soft glow at apertures wider than about f/4, placing a layer of haze over a basically focused shot and buffing away the sharper contrasts and detail for what is lazily called a “painterly” look. For this take, I didn’t have the gorgeous golden-hour light of the earlier shot, but I did get the daydream effect I had wondered about, even with mid-day Arizona light, which is harsher than a German schoolmistress.
Traveling photogs often find themselves in a take-it-or-leave-it take on random subjects, with reasons ranging from The Tour Bus Won’t Wait or We Weren’t Even Supposed To Be Stopping Here to We Won’t Be Back This Way Again. However, on those rare occasions when the option of a second approach presents itself, I heartily recommend scratching that itch and exorcising that nasty What Mighta-ism from your fevered brain.
YANKING OUT STUMPS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
OVER ITS FIRST TEN YEARS, THE NORMAL EYE HAS TRIED TO REFRAIN from commenting on all but the most essential technical advancements in the making of photographs. This, as we’ve often stated, is a forum about intentions and ideas rather than gear. It’s one thing to offer thoughts on the transition from analog to digital, a shift that’s fundamental and lasting in its effect, while it’s quite another to write at length on the introduction of the latest gizmo or feature, faddish things that will age poorly if they are remembered at all over time.
With that in mind, the impending transition away from the mechanical shutter, something that’s been forecast and fretted over for nearly a decade, is a case of something that will be of substantial consequence to anyone with a camera for years to come. The reason the shutter was invented in the first place was because it improved outcomes for photographers and made the entire process simpler and more precise, thus meeting the criterion for any technical advancement, that it helps us get out of our own way and spend more time taking pictures and less time getting ready to do so. Cameras get better when we spot the stumps in the way of where we want to build the highway and yank them out.
At this writing, Summer of 2022, the Nikon Z9, the first professional camera to be manufactured without a mechanical shutter of any kind, has been on the market for less than a year, but is likely to be followed soon, initially in the premium-price class. Many current cameras have offered the choice of either mechanical or electronic shutters for several years, but the Z9 is the first to eliminate the mechanical option entirely. This can clearly be seen as the latest in a line of progression that began with mirrorless cameras, and their elimination of the bulk and complexity (spelled: fail-ability) of the SLR mirror box.
With the box gone, it was logical to assume that the mechanical shutter and eventually the physical shutter button itself would be next to march to the gallows, since they are the final two components that feature moving parts, hence parts that can wear out and render a camera obsolete years ahead of its time. More importantly, the remaining problems in sensors that had thus far justified a mechanical shutter have been solved, meaning sleeker cameras for which shutter systems can evolve from mere focus lock and click servos to a wide menu of programmable aids, all while saving space and keeping more cameras out of the repair shop.
The change will not be overnight, but the genie is definitely out of the bottle, and, if you are reading this post years from now from our archive, you might wonder why we were making such a fuss about something so obvious. Cameras work best when they present the fewest obstacles between What I See and What I Get. The shutter originally served this function, removing a lot of stumps on the road to better pictures. Now it’s time for it to hang up its jersey. Or curtains.
Hey, I just heard that. It’s “curtains” for the shutter.
Get it?
Hello?
Is this thing on?
thenormaleye 