HALL PASS TO HEAVEN

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I WILL ALWAYS LOOK BACK FONDLY UPON MY FIRST, AND MOST TECHNICALLY LIMITED, days as a young photographer. I had gained entry to a world of wonder for the simple investment of five dollars, the cost of my first plastic box camera. The aperture and focus were fixed. There was but a single shutter button. All I could really control was whether I was smart enough to venture out in brilliant sunlight and where I chose to stand. The results, if we’re being kind, were, um, less than optimum. But I was in the club, and in the club I would stay.

The term “point and shoot” was not in great use in those days; that was largely a marketing term designed later to attract those who wanted the camera to do most of the work. And, of course, in the present day, it denotes a level of automatic precision that even so-called “grown-up” cameras couldn’t boast back then. Since that time, I have tried to escape the imposed gravity of that time, attempting to intervene as much as possible in the taking of a picture, to exercise as much personal control over the choices to be made. The idea of simply pointing and shooting, relinquishing my grip over the process, is largely a memory for me all these years later.

But there are exceptions.

Monterey Bay, California, October 10, 2010. 93mm, f/13, ISO 100, 1/100s.

There are still those rare occasions when all you really want to do is capture everything that’s in front of you, quickly, before it is gone. Places and moments where just bearing witness is almost more delight than your heart can hold. On such days, yes, you can agree to let the camera do most of the heavy lifting. You want no other thought in your head beyond Be Here, Now.

The morning of October 10, 2010 was just such a moment. My wife was attending a daylong library conference in downtown Monterey, California, leaving me nearly an entire morning to let the peninsula and bay reveal their miraculous beauty to me. I felt like a court reporter who can barely record a flood of fast testimony from the witness stand. My main thought was I have to get this down. I must have this. And this. And this as well. The entire time span of my random walkabout along the rocky shores near Pacific Grove that morning was probably less than an hour, and yet I felt like I was given some kind of all-access hall pass to heaven. The trip was one of the first real workouts with my new Nikon D60, and so the camera and I were still on a cautious kind of honeymoon. What’ll this thing do? Oh, it does that. Amazing. Because of the newness of our relationship, I was, on that morning, still largely defaulting to full auto on everything I was shooting, a mindset that put me in good stead, as the scenes before me were nearly foolproof; if you could frame it, the D60 would give it to you.

For photographers, being present beyond the distraction of dialing up settings can take a while to learn. There are days when you just want to scoop up everything you see without indulging in every possible calculation. But, like I said, there are exceptions. And when they happen, when they truly sweep you up in their wake, there is no better reminder of why you chose this life.