DOWN GO THE DOMINOES

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THOSE WHO WRITE HISTORIES ON PHOTOGRAPHY understandably see it as an unbroken series of technological breakthroughs that have allowed the art to move forward and gain wider adoption for an ever-growing audience. This leads to an endless litany of Who Did What followed by Who Did What Next followed by What Did It Mean. When I look at the breaking of these barriers, it’s even more personal. Because when something new happens in photography, the net result, for me, is to help me get to the picture-making part with less delay and fewer screwups.

Take the most elementary part of creating an image, i.e., the gathering of light. We make ourselves crazy trying to corral as much of it as quickly as possible with as few intermediary steps in the process. After actually grabbing the light, we get snarled in other thickets, such as how to refine it, how to use it as a compositional tool, even how to control its range in color and tone. All this takes time and patience and learning, and so I bow to no one in my adoration for the wizards who’ve helped me get there easier. The tools are changing incredibly fast and the benefits are bigger and deeper than ever before.

Take the idea of time exposure. The shot you see here was grabbed thirteen years ago, in the inky black of night, several hours after sunset, my camera, a crop-sensor DSLR, was mounted on a tripod and held open for ten seconds, allowing me to keep my ISO to 100, so zero noise. Jump ahead to 2025 and the larger, more sophisticated sensors of a full-frame camera, and it is nearly possible to take this photo handheld, albeit with a very high ISO that, amazingly, still comes out very, very clean. Is the tripod dead?

Certainly not, and you can draw up your own checklist of occasions that still call for it. Obsolescence happens slower than technical advancement (as witness the too-stubborn-to-die case of analog film). And yet. And yet we are that much closer to the tripod eventually going the way of the dodo, and in a remarkably brief stretch of time. That’s what I was pointing out at the top of this article; the fact that photography is swiftly getting to the point were excellence and flexibility are almost a given with present-day gear….with the steps needed to get the picture, to, in essence help us get out of our own way, being rapidly streamlined and simplified. Less calculating, more envisioning. Less adjustment, more captures. Every domino trips another domino trips another domino. Progress.