BACK TO BEING….A BEING

By MICHAEL PERKINS

VACATIONS ARE HARD WORK.

Well, sure, lying next to the pool and trying to grab the waiter’s attention for uno mas of whatever’s in this drink is not the exact same thing as hard labor. It’s just that, for some of us, effectively getting our minds on a leisure footing requires as much focus as learning any other important life skill, leading many of us to feel that it’s only as we head back for home that we’ve finally started to get the hang of the whole “chilling” thing. And since I am always making some kind of picture wherever I go, the results of my vacay snapping reflect the same process of adjustment as well.

It’s not enough to merely say that the images get “simpler”, or that I shoot more instinctively in some way while on holiday, although both those things certainly happen. It’s more like my entire perception of what a picture is for is changed, along with a different concept of what is worthy of a picture. For one thing, when I am away, I shoot almost equally with a cellphone and my more sophisticated cameras, something I rarely do at home. This affects the choices I make in a variety of ways, as happens whenever we shift from one device’s strengths/limits to those of another.

To cite but one example, I use a much narrower, and sometimes more dramatic range of post-processing effects (of which the picture up top is a product) on my cell camera than on my Nikon mirrorless, on which I nearly always shoot straight-out-of-the-camera. The phone camera also serves as a kind of “sketch pad” or first-take record of subjects I will return to later with the Nikon, whose tools are far more nuanced and controllable. All of this and more goes on in my back brain while my forebrain is telling  relax, you idiot.

If I’m lucky, I come home with at least a handful of images in which I somehow managed to do something different, moments in which I actually figured out how to be “on vacation”. In such cases, the expense and planning all seem worth it, and I re-experience at least a part of the electric thrill I felt the first time I put my eye up to a viewfinder.

Now that’s relaxing.