BACK TO BEING…A BEING

By MICHAEL PERKINS

VACATIONS ARE HARD WORK.

To be clear, lying poolside and trying to flag the waiter for uno mas of whatever’s in this drink is not as labor-intensive as, say, shoveling concrete. It’s just that applying mental mastery to the process of letting go can require practice, “focus”, if you like, for both man and camera. Doing nothing is actually just doing another kind of something, and figuring out what that something is shapes the kind of pictures you make while “taking it easy”. Like everything else “vacay”, I often feel like I’m just beginning to get the hang of things just when it’s time to pack up for home.

It’s not just that you shoot “looser” or more instinctively when on a trip, although that can certainly be a factor. It’s the intangibles as well. You’re not only evaluating, in the relaxed setting of a holiday, what a photo is for, you’re also making different judgements of what things are worthy of a photo. And then there are equipment issues; for example, when away, I tend to divide my work almost equally between a cel phone, on which I use a narrower, if more dramatic array of post-production remixes (see above) and my full-function mirrorless, with which I almost always shoot straight out of the camera.

In many vacation situations, the cel also acts as a kind of first-take “sketch pad” reference for ideas that I later finalize on some other device. And all of this is operating in my backbrain while my forebrain keeps nagging me to relax, damn you. But sometimes the magic breaks through. I can actually come home from time away with a small yield of pictures in which I managed to see a little differently, or somehow got out of my own way to a greater degree. In such cases I re-experience a part of the thrill I got the first time I put my eye to a viewfinder.

Now that’s relaxing.