A RESETTING OF SETTINGS

By MICHAEL PERKINS

MY FIRST QUARTER-CRNTURY IN THE AMERICAN WEST has completely re-ordered my senses, and, in turn, my evolution as a photographer. My concepts of beauty, design, history, and ecology have all been filtered by those years through a visual grammar that is indigenous to deserts and the kind of scale of space that was purely abstract to me as a boy in Ohio. It only makes sense, then, that as I entered the back half of my life, a completely different approach to picture-making would become my mental default.

A recent return trip to my native Midwest, for a longer-than-usual stretch than has been typical for many years, allowed me to schedule more than the standard lunches and reunions with family and friends. That, in turn, let me literally stop and smell the roses, as well as re-awakening my inner tree talker.

This sounds a lot less important than it is, but, in the creation of nature images “back home”, part of me is not only around more green but re-acclimating my eye to the process in seeing it. It’s not as if the West is entirely composed of tumbleweeds and cow skulls; it’s that green takes a back seat of sorts, a reverse of the role it plays in other regions. In returning to the parks and creeks where I came of age, I find myself overwhelmed by the challenges to my work flow; it forces me to slow my shooting time by more than half, if only to re-calculate the regional shifts to the basics of exposure, composition, and so on. I have to find my way back to a sense of belonging here. It’s a fraught journey, made even stranger by memory and other tricks of the mind.

And so it goes. Photography begins as a simple mechanical process, the faithful transcription of experience. But all great pictures begin and end in the brain, and adjusting those settings is far trickier than merely clicking dials on a camera.