THE TOUGHEST CAMERA ADJUSTMENT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING THINGS about studying the lives of photographers who are blessed with longevity is tracking the evolutionary changes within their styles. Edward Steichen is an amazing example. In his ninety-plus years, he was, alternatively, a photorealist, an impressionist, a stellar portrait artist, an amazing industrial photographer, a student of macro images with flowers, a curator, a printmaker, and an essential influence on fashion work. At each stage of his life, as he struggled to master himself, he also adopted, mastered and moved onward through the photographic discoveries and movements of an entire century. His was no mere technical adaptability, however, but a coordinated effort between self-discovery and its application to his art. You cannot creatively have one without the other.
We contend with many forces in life, with the ones between the ears being the most indicative of what art we will create.
I have often told my friends, as I myself slide further into antiquity, that the greatest gift you can receive as a human being is, simply, to get wise to yourself. You must be able to catalog and identify your every limit, possibility, failing and talent, and time’s impact on all of that, to make anything of value. If you stagnate, your art will follow suit. Getting to this promontory of self-knowledge is no easy feat, as you must abandon the convenient moral habit of seeing your every failing as someone/something else’s fault, and of giving yourself sole credit for your every success. It’s beyond cliche to refer to yourself as a “work in progress”, but it is simply the signal trait of a successful life. You can’t grow as a photographer, or a potter, or a golfer, or a fry cook without steadily increasing self-awareness, and that is won only by very hard, consistent effort.
There is a reason why all of the great philosophers share some version of the admonition “know thyself”. Shakespeare famously said that if you are true to yourself, you cannot be false to anyone else. Phrase the same sentiment in the more hackneyed language of a pop song, and you get “I gotta be me”. Same message, your translation may vary. Photographs are more than mere recordings. That what seismographs are for. Creating a picture means that you start at the back of the camera (actually behind it) with an idea, then press that concept forward through the machinery like a vintner pressing a grape until the ideal marriage of willful mind and obedient machine produces something that reflects the value of both. Adjustments within the camera are mostly practice and craft. Adjustments behind the camera measure something far more precious.
STATEMENT / SUGGESTION
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY CAN BE INCREDIBLY DIRECT as a means of conveying visual information. The terms of certain images are bare, even stark, with subtlety sacrificed in the service of immediacy. Some of the greatest pictures ever made tell their stories in very clear and simple terms. Nothing, for example, can surpass the power of the grainy immediacy of the photos taken of the explosion of the Hindenburg. Smack. Wham. No detours, all force, everything arriving in the now.
The choice between black-and-white and color in pictures is often a choice between that sharp, sudden newsfoto impact and a slower, more layered appeal to the senses. Scenic titles, at least over the last one hundred years, have seemed to cry out for a wide array of hues versus rendering the same subjects in variant tones of the same single color, or monochrome, and so color has become the default choice for several generations of shooters, with mono reserved for special effects or moods. We have developed an innate sense that, for certain “beautiful” things, shooting in a narrow range of tones is somehow “less than”…less than real, less than splendorous, less than lovely.
But do we have to automatically accept this proposition? Can monochrome images convey their own unique idea of beauty, equal to or even superior to color-splashed tableaux? Having been raised on mono from my first days with a camera (mostly an economic choice, given that color, while certainly popular, was pricey), I learned to work within what I then regarded as a constrictive box of narrow options, imaging how much better this or that would look in color. Now that color is the general default, I almost feel as if I must prove that a given shot would work better without it…that is, I have to have some kind of “note from teacher” to justify mono’s use, as if, of course, you need to shoot this in color, unless you’ve made the case to do otherwise.
Strange.
Photographers are often needlessly neurotic, of course, and so most of our “problems” are of our own making, but that’s the creative process for ya. I long ago formed the habit of clicking between pre-loaded recipes of settings, shooting multiple versions of more and more subjects, especially the ones that are “supposed” to be in color. Snapping off an additional exposure in mono costs me nothing and often affords me the chance to….what else..?….have yet another unresolvable argument with myself.
I really must seek therapy some day……..
(SHIFTING) POINTS OF PRIDE
by MICHAEL PERKINS
IT’S HELPFUL, OCCASIONALLY, TO CAST MY MIND BACK SOME FOURTEEN YEARS to the very first days of this blog. The initial motivation for starting The Normal Eye was to at least try to create a photograph platform different from those I was finding online at the time. It seemed that the dominant energy of most articles in those days involved product reviews and technical how-to’s, which I wanted to avoid, both because I felt that that “market”was already being saturated, and because I felt under-qualified to preach or pronounce on much of it. By way of contrast, trying to chronicle my own challenges and growth as a photographer felt easy and at least honest, and the idea of using TNE to emphasize motivations rather than mechanics felt like my most authentic path.
Since then, I’ve been gratified to also make connection with other shooters’ personal quests and alternate truths. They’ve kept me curious, grounded and humbled. Reluctant to act as little more than a student, I’ve inherited hundreds of teachers. It’s been a great arrangement.
This all came slamming back into my mind a few days ago, when I stumbled on this self-portrait from 2012, the year we launched The Normal Eye. After dealing with the initial shock of how much more hair I once had, as well as how much less I apparently weighed in those days, I was grateful that I had framed the shot wide enough to preserve at least a sample of my first “photo wall”, which consisted…what else?…of the work that I was proudest of at the time. In noting that not one of these images hangs on a wall where I currently live, I was reminded of just how and where (and why) I had made all of them. They were exercises in technique as well as hardware, making it easy to peg such-and-such a picture as having been taken “three cameras ago” or “before I really learned to do whatever I was going for there”.
The shots shown here, then, are a chronicle, a diary, reflecting my first extended work with prime lenses, montages, macro work, HDR processing, and a deliberate move away from flash and toward available light, but they are also a timeline, reflective of what I held to be important at the time, thoughts that made their way directly into TNE posts. In the most perfect way possible, my journey was the blog and the blog was my journey: the two streams of inquiry flowed back and forth into each other. I still believe that there are other voices far more qualified than my own to discuss hardware and tech, but I remain confident that I can still trust my instincts as a photographer, and that I can convey them into words that might at least encourage, if not teach. And for that, I am grateful.
SEND FOR OUR FREE CATALOG
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IN “VOICES OF OLD PEOPLE”, THE POIGNANT SOUND MONTAGE of eldercare patients assembled by a young Art Garfunkel for the 1968 Bookends album, one sentimental senior, unable to find an old snapshot, remarks that he would give “without regret, one hundred dollars for that picture”, a sentence that is saturated with a longing that can no longer be satisfied. That one utterance imprinted on my sixteen-year-old self, forever establishing the value of both the photographs left behind, but, even more, the ghostly essence of the images lost to time. Now, as I have reached (and probably surpassed) the age of the old man in that montage, I find that photographs are, more than ever, a kind of testimony for me, as well as a trail of bread crumbs for my children, who may be even more keenly aware than I that time is running short, and that certain information must be mustered.
That may be why, as Marian and I took on the daunting task, two years ago, of disposing of over half our earthly possessions in order to downsize to a more manageable space, we very deliberately photo-catalogued many items that were too troublesome to carry forward, but which still might have the power to spark fond memory, for us and especially our kids. We were caught up in the newly popular practice of Swedish Death Cleaning, the discipline involved in just leaving less stuff behind for others to sort through and clean up once one leaves the stage. These pictures of various trophies and keepsakes were not rushed, like random snapshots, but done in as close to studio conditions as our very short timeline permitted. After all, they have to capture the elusive essences that made us hoard the objects for long. They are storage batteries for a very personal energy.
The diorama that Marian’s daughter made of her dream dance studio back in grade school (top) and my fond farewell to my enormous “kit bag” of electronic connectors and adapters (above) shared the same fate, i.e, the “discard” pile, but not before they posed for their respective close-ups. They shared “studio” space with wall art, old book friends, Art Deco teapots, shirt-pocket radios and a swarm of other life markers. It’s amused us to consider that, having gotten rid of one kind of junk pile, i.e., the actual physical souvies of a lifetime, that we merely swapped it for an electronic cache that will also have to be decoded by our loved ones, if they are so inclined. Hard to know if that’s really progress, but……
At the end of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends song cycle, as two friends, both advanced in age (“how terribly strange to be seventy..”), share a park bench, they again underscore the value of a physical memento of their shared adventures:
long ago, it must be……I have a photograph…….preserve your memories…..they’re all that’s left you……..
SIZE (STILL) ISN’T EVERYTHING
In photography, as in so many other things, one man’s luxury is another man’s bulky nuisance….
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY IS AT LEAST PARTIALLY ABOUT barriers to good picture-making, and how they were overcome. This means that, when a solution to a longstanding problem is introduced, let’s say a technical or ease-of-use breakthrough, the new way of doing things is celebrated by someone saying that the old ways are now “dead”. Digital imaging? Oh, it’s the death of film. Better sensors? Well, that’s the death of lo-fi images. And cellphone cameras? Well, that’s obviously curtains for the compact camera.
On that last one….
Camera phones were an amazing bend in the road, redefining the traditional appeal of point-and-shoot with even more size convenience and eliminating the need for a separate, dedicated camera. The impact of cels was so huge that, initially, it even allowed us to overlook just how technically primitive the first generations of them were. The shock wave was most measurable in the shipment figures for compact cameras, which were nearly cut in half between 2010 and 2020, when the decline began to slow, and then partially reverse. An entirely new class of compacts, smaller in size but more expensive than their predecessors, began to lure customers back by boasting more fine-tuned control than point-and-shoots of previous years and specs and performance that rivaled DSLRs and even full-frame models. The tide was further turned by two simple words: Tik. Tok.
Again, the actual user universe makes the final decision on what photographic format or system is “alive” or “dead”, with Tik-Tok’s immense social media platform beginning new dialogues on whether cels or new compacts produced better pictures, along with a comparison on the experience in shooting this way or that. Shooters could go on TT and see side-by-side views of pictures of the same subjects taken with cels or one of the new compact superstars like, say, the Canon PowerShot G7 X and post their impressions. Will the pricey, sexy new compacts spell the “death” of iPhone photography? Not bloody likely, no more than the highly touted rise of cels spelled “death” for older compacts.
There will always be mega-millions who opt for a cel’s ease of use, which, paired with its rapidly advancing technical prowess, spells convenience that a separate camera often can’t deliver. But at least we can agree that greeting a new development in the art of photography doesn’t automatically render everything that went before it obsolete. No craft rooted in creativity can afford to be that close-minded, and we’ve seen far too many cases in which, in our very individual pursuit of pictures, we declare everything old to be new again.
FOR WHICH IT STANDS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY, SINCE IT TRAFFICS IN FROZEN MOMENTS OF TIME, is, of necessity, in the business of symbols.
We have scant, stolen instants in which to try to simplify complicated ideas, to improvise a visual shorthand for concepts that the philosophers fill bookshelves explaining, or attempting to. And symbols are the key instruments in that shorthand, as we mean for this to stand for this, or for that to imply that, and so on. The tricky thing about symbols, however, is that they convey different things to different people. They are fluid, mutable. Personal.
So who owns the symbols of unity? Of freedom? Of defiance? Dedication? Memory? Pride?
Patriotism?
As America counts down the final weeks to the 250th anniversary of its founding, we can easily forget that flags, decals, banners or badges are not pure in their power, nor are they universal in their meaning. There are too many of us that have lived too many different kinds of lives for any one set of symbols to say the same things to all of us. And so, in an era of almost unparalleled division, it’s only natural that we disagree also over who “owns” this things. If I wear the Stars and Stripes on the seat of my jeans, am I celebrating my freedom to do so, or disrespecting the rigid ritual of Old Glory aloft on a flagpole? History is layered, and symbols can be tweaked, exploited, or shanghaied to serve the programs of many people with many aims. Photographs of the various ways we decide to celebrate something like a flag can explore nearly infinite interpretations, and therefore the visual subject cannot be exhausted. Every depiction of a widely-used symbol merely underscores how non-common, how very personal it is.
Maybe the best way to show respect for a symbol is to acknowledge all the ways it has been used; as tribute, as memorial, as rallying cry, as bludgeon, as emblem of hope, or badge of error. To photograph people who are “rallying round” a flag, or any other talisman, is to document all these uses and imply many more. Pictures thus become more than mere documents, but evolve instead into a kind of testimony.
GENTLEMEN, START YOUR LENSES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
NEW CAMERA START-UP PACKAGES IN THE YEAR OF OUR FORD 2026 are marketed in almost the opposite way they were a generation ago. Back in the days of Ronald Reagan, manufacturers that had been accustomed to selling permanently attached lenses to their bodies suddenly saw an explosion in SLR sales, and with it, the demand for detachable glass in various focal lengths. Thus came the idea of the “kit” lens, which, for quite a while, tended to be of a single focal length. Indeed, lots of us elders’ first “grown-up” cameras came with a 50mm or 35mm prime. Back then, this made more sense than equipping bodies with lenses of variable focal lengths, since zooms of the period were bulkier, slower and more expensive. Primes were more compact and reliable.
Fast forward to the current market, and you see the complete reversal of this thinking. Selling a kit lens with a variable focal length, say, a 24-70 or 18-55, is now thought to afford new photographers more versatility, an easier break-in period for a wider range of techniques. This has been made possible by vast technical improvements that allow zooms to be smaller and far more responsive than was the case forty years ago, including greater ranges for maximum aperture. There is also the consideration of price, as a variable optic allows the user to save money on the purchase of separate specialized (limited?) optics. As a consequence, new cameras today are almost never packaged with a prime as its kit.
These days, both a prime and a zoom can make this shot, but the prime is still faster and sharper by far.
This where we inject the Joni Mitchell line about “something’s lost, but something’s gained”, since, in photography, new choices often obliterate old choices. Fact is, there is still an argument to be made for primes as a learning tool for newbies, if for no other reason than that, since they contain fewer glass elements than zooms, less light is diffracted on its way to the sensor, which greatly affects sharpness. Primes’ performance at lower light is also still leaps and bounds beyond that of zooms. And, of course, even primes can be “zoomed” to a degree (an old technique we call “walking”), which actually promotes more compositional mindfulness than just hitting the “tele” toggle.
My point is that, still, today, some photographers might be more than glad to learn on a prime, if it were on offer. I would therefore love to see manufacturers offer two basic kit packages when introducing a new camera, one with a zoom and one with a prime. Neither option should obviate the other for the consumer. This is merely reflective of the fact that there can never be just one way to gain experience, and that no options are strong enough to be universal decrees. I can really only speak to what works for me, and yet I strongly support more choices for more platforms. Camera tech needs to be as inclusive as possible so that photography can fully thrive.
HERE TO STAY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IMPERMANENCE IS GENERALLY THE ONLY PERMANENCE HUMANS KNOW, with the world collapsing inward and rolling back upward like kneaded bread dough. No sooner does one of this world’s societal textures surface but it gets folded under and turned out of sight. And within that “general” pattern there is an even more insistent rhythm of change that is uniquely American. We Yanks feverishly worship the new and doggedly discount the old, tearing down just as speedily as we built up. Having reverence for age, experience or context is often too tall an order for us. And so, in America, the demolition crews and the construction gangs are in a continuous tag-team flow.
And if this is generally true in American cities in general, it is even more so in places designed for high turnover, like resort spots or beach towns, where a dizzying worship of the novel confers a kind of gypsy status on most local businesses. That’s why, as a photographer, I am not only impressed but amazed to find places that have lasted and even thrived for more than six months straight. As one example, my new hometown of Ventura, California, a beach town’s beach town, has been in the heart of a major regentrification boom for the past decade or so. Lots of that new energy naturally flowed from the business district’s forced improvs in the wake of the pandemic, when everything in town adopted a change-or-die mentality. After the smoke cleared, it was easy to see which local joints had the best staying power, because, well, they stayed.
I will always slow my roll (and break out my camera) for any place sporting an “in business since (year)” sign, and so I absolutely had to check out both the street face and the bill of fare at Tony’s Pizzaria, just three blocks off the Pacific, and, as it says up front, “est. 1959”. I always shoot the entrances of such places head on, as if they are sets in a stage play, and I always hope to convey their true atmosphere by catching some customers In The Act Of. And in case you’re wondering, why, yes, I did try the pizza, and other than losing the top-half of a molar crown that was already on its last legs (roots?), I rate it a wondrous experience. I’d like to think that someone could drive past Tony’s in 2059 and marvel, as I did, that some things, even inside a centrifuge, can last.
LAST BOW
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IF YOU THINK THAT LIFE IS ABSURD, consider….death.
Not the mere fact of the end of life. No, properly viewed, that final human stage can lead to some fierce contemplation, maybe even a revelation or two. No, it’s our own hilarious method of experiencing or marking death that reveals it for, at least some of us, one final shot at vanity. At mattering. Ranking.
We shop carefully for the precise spot where we or others we love will “spend” eternity, even though none of the surface elements we employ….the rituals, the tributes, and so on, are, themselves, of the eternal world. They’re expressed instead in the physical media that we understand. Mighty monuments. Pondrous headstones. Majestic crypts. It’s our last stab at distinction; my mausoleum is grander than yours. My farewell drew more mourners.
And so on.
I make a lot of photographs of cemeteries when I travel. Not out of some ghoulish need to hang with the dead, but because I find that what we try to do to comfort the living is, by turns, both elegant and idiotic, prosaic and foolish. There is also the endless pictorial variety in graveyards. Many are similar but none are truly alike. And then there is the acidic scar that time etches onto the “eternal” markers we’ve erected, creating mystery about the dead that their inscriptions, washed away by the decay of centuries, cannot answer. Initially, we are just dead; eventually, we are also forgotten.
Images from various boneyards can sometimes anchor them in their surrounding communities. They provide context, even commentary. One age’s sacred ground becomes another generation’s industrial development site. It’s as if, by trying to erect permanent tributes to our mortality, we actually underscore the futility of that very task. But the attempt goes on, and the pictures that come serve as a kind of barometer of how we see ourselves, and what we think we’ve amounted to.
MEANS AND ENDS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
And if you don’t know where you’re goin’, any road’ll take you there—-George Harrison
THE PERSON WHO COINED THE PHRASE, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” may not have been a photographer, but he/she certainly summed up a key truth about picture-making. Ever since we first started freezing images in boxes, we’ve been trying to craft shortcuts to the creation of our favorite effects, generally adopting the idea that results are about just that, results, and who really sweats what tool or technique you used to get them? Some of the earliest problems in photography, like engineering media sensitive enough to make immediate exposures, took decades to solve, as did the puzzle of providing supplementary flash without, you know, setting fire to the drapes. But we are now at a stage when the tinkerer’s first version of how to pull off something is followed up by simpler shortcuts in less and less time.
More and more, we initially discover how to do things by fairly laborious means, only to turn around seconds later and see a digital or A.I. shortcut that performs the same magic trick at the flick of a button or swipe of a screen. This convenience, wonderful as it is, is sometimes met with suspicion, as if a thing can’t be worthy or good if it comes too easy. This view, that only shooters who bravely grapple with unwieldy processes are making “real” pictures, is a snotty country-cousin to the belief that only those who shoot all-manual are “true” photographers. Me, I’m fine with painting a big wall with a paint brush, but, if I can do it just as well in half the time with a roller, then, yes, please, hook me up.
Selective “Lensbaby” focus, achieved in post-processing with a quick pinch and swipe via the Hipstamatic phone app.
Take, as an example, the recent love affair many have struck with the manual lenses that allow for selective focus to be achieved in-camera, as marketed wonderfully well by Lensbaby and other optics houses. With such specialized glass, a floating “sweet spot” of sharpness is preselected by the user, placed wherever he/she may desire it, surrounded by a soft haze that serves to call extra attention to the subject matter within the selected focus area…all of it done in-camera. These specialized lenses are fairly costly and tend to be one-trick ponies, in that their optics may not be optimum for all the uses found on standard glass. And then there is the time spent in climbing the lens’ learning curve, since uniform results are far from guaranteed.
Now, contrast that to a single trick among dozens of offered post-processing effects within a single phone app, which, in the case of our illustration, is called Hipstamatic. Selecting “depth of field” among the choices, and applying a little stretch-and-pinch of the fingers, renders the Lensbaby effect immediately, and with even greater flexibility, since, with the ability for endless re-dos of the effect before locking in the final version, there is no standard trial-and-error. Also, since you are basically working on a copy of your original, it remains pristine and ready to be taken in other directions on another day, based on your whim. All for the one-time cost of the app, which, in this case, was zero.
Having once invested in the speciality lenses required to make such a shot, must I regard the app-rendered version “less than”? Certainly not in the quality or effectiveness of the final result, and certainly not when it comes to any yardstick of economy or efficiency. The app does what I ask of all photographic processes; places as few barriers as possible between my vision of an image and my ability to hold the result in my hand. Sometimes, as G.Harrison implies, you want to calmly saunter down the old dirt road. And sometimes you want to take the expressway.
VISIONS FROM OTHER KINDS OF EYES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IT TOOK ME OVER HALF A LIFETIME OF STUDYING WHAT I CONSIDERED THE “GREATS” OF WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY to realize just how biased my own eye was, how it was inclined to see all cultures mostly as my own culture was inclined to see. The first images I loved were basically travelogues, that is, scenes from so-called “foreign” nations, as interpreted almost exclusively by Western photographers. “My” people, looking at “their” worlds, traveling afar and coming back to me with stories whose truth I took at face value.
It has taken me a long time, too long, to seek out the visions of people my cultural prejudices regarded as “the other”, to delight myself in the storytelling of indigenous people reporting and commenting on their own worlds, instead of waiting for outsiders (us) to tell those stories for them. It has led me to amazing work, and, lately, to a remarkable Chinese artist named Fan Ho, a visionary whose career spanned over seventy years, ending in 2016, and standing as a true chronicle on the evolution of China since the close of WWII. He was a street photographer long before such a term existed, developing an instinct for what Westerners called “the decisive moment” that elusive instant when all the narrative powers of an image are in perfect sync.
Born in Shanghai in 1931, Ho began snapping at an early age with a Kodak Brownie box camera, graduating to a Rolleiflex K4A, the camera that would be his career-long tool, when he was just fourteen. Developing his film in the family bathtub, Ho was almost completely self-taught, insisting that equipment and technique both took a back seat to emotion, and that he “didn’t work with any sense of purpose”. “I’ve always believed that any work of art should stem from genuine feelings and understandings”, he told an interviewer in 2014. “As an artist, I was only looking to express myself. I did it to share my feelings with the audience. I need to be touched emotionally to come up with meaningful works.”
By 1949, Ho’s family moved to Hong Kong, then beginning its rocket-sled ride into the fraternity of super cities, and experiencing unique growing pains and turmoil as it did so. Ho’s mastery of contrasting tones and shadows made for some of the most impactful black-and-white photography of the twentieth century, a magical balancing act between revealing and concealing. Beginning in 1956, his entry into exhibitions earned him over 280 international awards for excellence, and by the 1950’s, he segued into his second career in cinema, becoming a director a few years after and producing feature films until around 1980. Re-locating to San Jose, California in retirement, and encouraged by friends to return to still photography, he instead chose to curate his old negatives to gain access to shows in the United States, where many critics discovered the breadth and range of his output. At this writing, the easiest way to see even part of his work is in online image searches, as nearly all of his formally published collections are either out of print or seriously expensive…when they can be found.
I am one of many who wound up being late to the Fan Ho party, but a party’s still a party no matter when you arrive, and I am grateful for the chance to learn still another way to see, regardless of where the lesson originates. After all, the only real chance you have to learn anything is to admit how little you know.
KICKED OUT OF THE NEST
By MICHAEL PERKINS
“YOU MUST SUFFER TO BE BEAUTIFUL“, runs the old adage, which I always took to mean that anything worthwhile comes with some degree of sacrifice. Without musing too much about what happens to all of us who suffer and still are ugly, let’s at least admit that, like it or not, beauty, or art, has to be coaxed and groomed into existence, which I suppose is why the noun artist is so frequently preceded by the modifier tortured. The take-home of this, at least for me as a photographer, is that no real growth or improvement comes unless you risk frustration and/or failure. There’s a reason why many mommy birds teach their kids to fly by simply kicking them out of the nest. Comfort is the enemy of creative evolution.
That’s why this entry seems to cry out for an ornithological illustration, as I myself have found the pursuit of bird images to be the perfect vehicle for kicking myself out of my own creative nest. Other than landscape work, I find that shooting birds requires greater amounts of patience and humility than anything else I’ve ever undertaken in photography. Even with sixty-plus years of experience under my belt, making bird pictures puts me immediately back at Square One, feeling like an ignorant child who doesn’t even grasp which way to point the bloody camera. In terms of applying what I’ve learned over a lifetime in pursuit of greater success with my feathered friends, I keep thinking of the old Firesign Theatre comedy album, Everything You Know Is Wrong, and I fantasize that, had I the temperament of a Buddhist monk, I might, somehow, have gotten better than I am at the whole game.
The image seen here is typical of thousands of bird images that I’ve attempted that fall into some murky grey zone between Almost Good and Bloody Embarrassing. You’ve also taken pictures like this, with one or two elements showing promise and others that seem to say Sorry, I’m New At This. “Suffering to be beautiful”, in the case of my wildlife shots, means taking what’s an average “hit ratio” of decent-to-failed pictures and learning to be satisfied with less. A lot less. Turns out that living creatures who must spend all day, every day, just trying to stay fed and alive are remarkably unconcerned with whether or not I get the shot. Go figure. That means that my photographs are made at their whim, not mine.
I have to think of myself, therefore, as a witness to a great picture rather than as its author. The number of things under my control in a standard shooting situation shrinks to near invisibility for bird work, and so, whenever I get lazy or stale, I really ought to “sentence” myself to a bird shoot just to be forced to work at the highest level of intentionality and mental focus. Returning to our opening meditation on birds leaving the nest, it’s worth remembering that some youngsters who fledge from precarious perches, like a spiny Saguaro cactus for example, have one try at flinging themselves clear of the plant to avoid being impaled on it. Now that’s someone who understands something about leaving your comfort zone.
RISE OF THE UPSTARTS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
Pancake with a punch: newcomer Viltrox’. body-cap-sized 28mm f/4.5 for full-frame cameras (various mounts) with AF.
THE MARKET FOR CAMERA LENSES HAS ALWAYS EXPANDED in all directions at once, affording photographers an embarrassment of riches when it comes to selecting their best optical options.
There is always the most traditional route, in which various makes of cameras promote their own proprietary lines of brand-new products from macro to telephoto and everything in between…what one might call the “brand-loyal” route, a path which can lead to a substantial investment in cutting-edge tech. Then there is the “lest we forget” wing, in which new cameras are paired with older model optics long vanished from their parent company’s active product line, often adapted from one format to another, such as the refit from DSLR-era glass to new uses on full-frame cameras. Lately, there has also been a kind of retro retrenchment, as lo-fi (but not always lo-cost, lol) lenses are marketed to “serious shooters” for a rebirth of randomness, error or “authenticity”, as unpredictability is re-introduced to a process that’s grown, for some, a bit sterile.
And now, as we near the one-third mark on the 21st century, a tremendous wave of fresh product is coming from a new crop of third-party optics houses entering the market at the low end of the investment scale, providing amazing features that traditionally were found only in costlier major-brand lenses. Established third-party players like Tamron and Sigma have been joined by new players that include Laowa, Rokinon, TTArtisan, 7Artisan, and Viltrox, with more players entering the game each year. And while the new kids had mostly been sporting models with manual focus only, that barrier is falling as well. The small-as-a-body-cap Viltrox 28mm f/4.5 pancake lens shown here delivers quick, responsive auto-focus for just $99, with other brands rushing their own wafer-thin, fixed-focal-length versions to market as we speak. Reviewers whose critical default is a down-the-nose dismissiveness toward upstarts have had to rethink their biases, and the “rules” of who can be competitive in the optical field are likewise being radically rethunk. Long gone are the days when one country, tradition or brand had a lock on what constituted a “good” lens, a leveling of the playing field which can only benefit the consumer.
IT COULD ONLY EVER BE THUS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
COMPARED TO THE INTRICATE ASSEMBLY OF THE COVER SHOT FOR THE SGT. PEPPER ALBUM just two years prior, the creation of the cover for 1969’s Abbey Road, the Beatles’ final studio album, was a relative snap (excuse the expression).
Whereas Pepper’s “people we like” montage of life-sized celebrity cut-outs took days of prop arrangement and a true jigsaw process of addition and subtraction, the task for photographer Iain Macmillan on Abbey was relatively simple. Find a suitable location, engage a cop to briefly block traffic, and parade the Fab Four back and forth in what would become the most iconic procession in pop music history. Macmillan, a friend of both John Lennon and Yoko One, arrived at the site with a rough idea of the object of the shoot, as Paul McCartney had already worked up some pencil sketches of how the group wanted to be arranged in the “zebra” crosswalk. Iain needed only to clear the intersection and climb a borrowed ladder to get the correct angle and framing for all four Beatles.
And since I can hear you all asking out there in the blogosphere, Macmillan’s weapon of choice for the assignment was a Hasselblad fronted by a 50mm lens. He shot at f/22 and 1/500th second, given that it was a clear August day with plenty of sunlight to spare. The entire shoot totaled no more than six frames, with McCartney selecting the fifth shot in the sequence, reportedly because it showed the group walking away from the Abbey Road studios, a kind of subtle farewell to the site of their best work over the previous decade. It also came closest, among the frames, to give the impression that they were all in the same general step rhythm (make of that what you will). What the final choice shows most clearly, though, given the global familiarity of the final product, is the way in which a simple editorial call can take a shot that’s merely one in a generally similar batch of images, and make it not only acceptable but inevitable, as if to say, of course, that’s the only one which would have worked.
In examining the options that might have been in the making of a classic photograph, we see the true value of editorial judgement, of learning how to pluck the classic shot from a clutch of okay alternatives. Assuming that McCartney was, indeed, the final arbiter of which of Macmillan’s photos was to be “the keeper”, one wonders what George or Ringo, accomplished photographers in their own right, might have chosen. But Fate went the way She went. Inside many of our most casual bursts of frames might lurk an “inevitable”, a picture that cries “it could only ever be thus”. Our judgements after the snap are often the equal of everything that went before it. It’s a long and winding road (again, sorry).
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT
BY MICHAEL PERKINS
I’M AMAZED THAT, AMONG ALL THE MYRIAD THEMED PHOTOGRAPHIC COMPETITIONS the whole world over, that at least one annual contest isn’t totally dedicated to Ruin, a sort of Devastation-Thon of images dedicated to all things ravaged, savaged, rotted, bombed, exploded, imploded, crashed, crushed, smashed, burned, broken, annihilated, obliterated and generally blown to hell. It would not, as you might first assume, be a montage of misery, but a celebration of one of the most consistently appealing subjects in the history of photography.
Let’s face it; ever since we began freezing images inside boxes, we have been endlessly fascinated with the remains of things, the disintegrating aftermaths of global conflict, urban decay, human tragedy. In various ages we have labeled this fascination “realism” or “journalism” or “commentary”, but whatever tags we apply to the practice. we continue our attraction to the visual depiction of destruction and loss. Ashes. Wrecks. Carnage. We chronicle the places where hope has flown, where glory has faded, where victories turned to failures. We and our cameras are always on call When Things Go Wrong.
As storytellers, we are drawn to when the story grinds to a close, when the fresh becomes the trashed. Maybe making pictures of ruin is just half the job of telling the tale of mankind. Beginning, meet end. Dream, meet nightmare. But I honestly believe that we should embrace our role as photographic crepe hangers by hosting a dedicated and curated show of Absolute Misery. It’s more entertaining than flowers, mountains and sunrises, and, as we’ve shown since the first camera started clicking, it’s a subject we cannot exhaust. Or resist.
INVISIBLE BLIGHT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
CLEAR BACK IN THE LATE 1940’s, ARCHITECT FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT began correspondence with various agencies and even president Harry Truman to protest the construction of an array of massive electrical towers proposed for the open desert directly opposite his seasonal headquarters at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was furious at the idea of the pristine view out the front door of his architectural academy being polluted with the sight of the metal monsters, and proposed that the power lines connecting them be buried underground. Wrong century for fighting the westward advance of American infrastructure. The towers were built and Wright reversed the entrance to his retreat, architecturally turning his back on the ugly sight.
Skip forward three-fourths of a century later and views all over the world are still blocked and blighted with the hideous snarl of wires and relays from the 1900’s. It is the kind of visual garbage that, as regular citizens and especially as photographers, we have all learned to not see, rather like looking through a windshield that is so coated with spatters and bug guts that our lacerated eyes simply focus through it all. Moving from Wright’s bailiwick in Scottsdale to Ventura, California nearly two years ago, I found myself with a stunning view out my apartment terrace of the Topatopa mountain range which, like many peaks along the central coast of the state, rises up rapidly from the nearby Pacific shoreline, going from warm sands to snow-capped peaks of well over 7,000 feet in height within just a few miles. It is the kind of view that begs to be captured in a camera, one of nature’s photographic freebies.
Except.
Except that, to my amazement, while composing the shot, I was astonished by the degree to which I simply did not notice that any view of mountains would have to be through a maze of wires. More upsetting than the horrible clutter of the scene was realizing that I had simply become accustomed, over far too many years, to just not seeing them at all. I once heard a Nikon ambassador say that one of his students could have been on an ocean liner, hundreds of miles from land, and still manage to get wires into her pictures. Now, I was that person, instead of the champion of intentional vision that I had convinced myself I was. Given the gorgeous sight of snow across the top of the Topatopas the other day, I’m still glad I took the shot, although it now goes, along with many other near misses, into the Good Idea, But file. In my youth, I held put the hope that that file would shrink somewhat as I grew old and wise in my photographic pursuits. But, as it turns out, the mountain of mastery is always there, day after day, and just as dauntingly tall, no matter how many times you loop around the race track. And learning to look for what you’ve taught yourself not to see, the invisible blight, is part of that daily ascent.
IT’S NOT THE SHOES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I WAS RECENTLY READING AN ARTICLE that centered not so much on the unique talent of legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson as on the succession of early 35mm Leica’s that were his go-to tools. In the writer’s defense, I believe he was at least trying to make the case that HCB’s kit merely facilitated his own wonderful vision, assisting but not making his greatest images. However, a reader that already regards certain cameras with the zeal of a cult worshiper could easily come away with the opposite view, that those Leicas were, themselves, a determinative force in how his pictures came out. And that’s unfortunate.
People who sell consumer goods tap into the human habit of crediting things for what might be achieved by intelligent use of those things. Eat this breakfast cereal and break the four-minute mile. Ride around your neighborhood on the tires that won the Indy 500. The pitch even works in reverse psychology, as in Spike Lee’s brilliant ’80’s ads for Nike, in which he kept asking various basketball superstars, “it’s the shoes, isn’t it?” The payoff was, of course, a knowing wink to the consumer, i.e., “well, no, it’s not really the shoes, hee hee, but, P.S., Jordan wears ’em, so…” And, for shooters, the equivalent pitch: buy this camera/lens/attachment/app and become a great photographer. It’s an easy approach for advertisers, because it appeals to our own bias about what creates excellence, which, in many cases, the advertisers have “taught” us to believe in the first place.
Cartier-Bresson, whose sense of composition was said to be so keen that he was known to merely raise the camera to his eye and click in one unbroken motion, developed that economical sense of execution on his own, irrespective of what gear he was using. He employed the simplest, most streamlined approach to making pictures that he could, and, as a matter of historic accident, the early Leica’s, themselves very no-frills affairs, gave him all the machine he needed to get the job done, and nothing more. Other manufacturers could likely have served the same elemental function for him, but, as fate would have it, Leica got there first, and so became an inextricable part of his legend, a lazy kind of “oh, that’s how he did it” explanation for a genius that simply cannot be explained.
One wonders how long the camera industry could thrive if manufacturers could not (a) make us discontented with what we already have, and (b) convince us that the next toy we buy will make us a Cartier-Bresson. But the real “camera” in photography is the one positioned behind our eyes. Knowing where to hit the nail-head is more important than merely buying a premium hammer. It really, honestly, swear to God, is not the shoes.
REALITY ON DEMAND
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ANY TIME I HEAR SOMEONE WAXING NOSTALGIC for the “good old analog days” I am tempted to check their forehead for sign of a fever. Certainly there are elements of the film experience that, decades after the dawning of the digital revolution, I can still look back on with a smile, there are just as many aspects of working in that medium that fall into the “good riddance” category…clumsy, burdensome steps that put ungainly obstacles between envisioning a shot and being able to execute it expeditiously. Strangely, initial reaction to the technical simplification of the making of an image has often been negative, even vehement. For example, many of we elders can still recall the hue and cry that issued from the ranks of the purists when auto-focus was introduced, with direct predictions that true photography was now dead, etc., etc.. blah, blah, blah.
And you can go on down the line, from the math whiz meanderings of light meters to automatic film advance, to, well, make your own list. Near the top of my own “thank God that’s over” roster is the calculation of white balance, which used to require a lot of back-of-the-envelope figuring and is now, like so many other fine functions, an on-demand dial-up. Clicks. I certainly am not downplaying the vital aspect of the right color temperature for the right shot, and, indeed, formal portraitists and studio shooters still have a more essential need for pinpoint precision in this area. But for many more of us, WB is an elective choice made in a moment and largely on a whim, as in the two sunset exposures seen here, taken barely a minute apart from each other. These images are one intentionality level up from straight snapshots, and yet, I can produce drastically different results in an on-the-fly shooting situation where the ambient light is changing rapidly and speed and ease are key.
Cameras are now loaded with many more control options than many of us will need in a lifetime of use, like the now-standard menus of emulations designed to re-create the look of dozens of different classic film emulsions, or custom settings for diffraction compensation. Many of these functions were once, like white balance, slow and tricky to achieve. Now they are a click away. And with the departure of all that bother, another barrier between thinking of a shot and getting it has been eliminated. The purists can, of course, make things harder for themselves out of some affection for “authenticity”. Me, I want to get to the making the picture. Immediately, if not sooner.
LXXIV, OR THEREABOUTS
Through his nightmare vision
He sees nothing, only well
Blind with the beggar’s mind
He’s but a stranger, he’s but a stranger to himself—Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I’VE SCRIBBLED MUCH IN THESE PAGES OVER THE YEARS about the challenge of doing something photographers both big and small do zillions of times per day, with widely varied results; attempt a self-portrait that actually tells the truth.
Knowing the kind of entertaining liar I can be at times, I always mistrust my results, as, when it comes to self-knowledge, I may be the ultimate “unreliable narrator” available for making an image of myself that is honest. Not that I haven’t tried. As decades of birthdays have come and gone, I’ve posed myself in both formal and casual settings, in search of some elusive quality of…. authenticity?……only to wind up feeling like, oh, hell, I’ll get it right next year…..
This time out, this February 8th, I saw the task differently, as I have just spent several months trying to regroup from a series of nerve injuries which included my forearms, a condition that made simple tasks like opening a pickle jar seem herculean. The temporary loss of strength and fine motor function in my fingers was especially depressing, since it wrecked havoc with my ability to operate a camera with any real degree of control. Suddenly, my artist father’s old teachings about hand-eye coordination came back to me in heartbreaking echoes. What if that linkage between what I could see and what I could execute were to remain forever severed?
And so, with mere days to spare before turning seventy-four, for me to actually get 99% of that back….well, it certainly clarified the terms of any birthday selfie I might normally have planned. No big costume changes, no symbolic props, just a simple document that my eye and my hand were back on speaking terms. No other kind of image seemed to make sense; I was crawling out of a hole in which normally conjoined parts of me were not connecting, and there could be no other visual depiction of that reconciliation than documenting the re-establishment of that link. Life, like photography, is often a game of inches, with all of us struggling to have our grasp exceed our reach, and when your fingers occasionally close around those goals, you’ve snatched the greatest treasure in life.
thenormaleye 
THEY ALSO SERVE WHO ONLY STAND AND WAIT…..
By MICHAEL PERKINS
STREET / NEIGHBORHOOD PHOTOGRAPHY IS LARGELY A STUDY OF CONTRASTING ROLES, of bearing witness to the millions of tasks, large and small, that are our daily assignments. We go here and do this. We always open this, or close that, or wait upon he, she, it, etc., etc, as if we were pre-cast in some larger production. Or as the Beatles famously sang of the pretty nurse, selling poppies from a tray, “though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway….”
For me, there are endless narrative opportunities in just isolating these roles, these tasks, and by looking at them a little closer, elevate them a bit from mere “work” or “this is just what I do.” I try to find people that are lost in repetition, locked into the mechanical rhythm of doing certain things over and over. And just as there is fascination in seeing how the gears and wheels of a massive timepiece mesh together for a common result, there is just as much of a story to be read in just one of those gears….its design, how it is meant to fit into its larger context. What it (or who) was designed to do.
I can’t speak specifically about what caught my eye about this greeter/ticket-taker/stage door manager sitting the check-in desk at a community arts center. He just seemed to perfectly fit where he was placed, and thus was as atmospheric as the surrounding furniture or fixtures. As is the case with many photographs, it was very much a thing of the moment, and what constitutes “a moment” for me might leave you utterly cold. So be it. So be the pictures. It’s a Sunday morning and I am lazily looking back at images of different people doing what they themselves would term “nothing special” and musing over my attempt to see, and show, that they are actually very special indeed.
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March 15, 2026 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Candids, Commentary, Street Photography | Leave a comment