SUPER STAND-INS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
Los Angeles’ E.Clem Wilson building, the first structure to portray the Daily Planet on film.
SINCE ITS VERY BEGINNINGS, THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY has made bank by creating and marketing alternative realities, visions of what they hope we’ll believe, at least until the last frame of film clears the projector gate. So lasting are some of these illusions that they become more authentic than the actual in-life objects or locations that were used to generate them.
In my own case, one of the first and most influential times a thing from the “real” world was re-purposed to stand for something else was in my daily viewing of reruns of The Adventures Of Superman, in which exteriors of various Los Angeles landmarks were substituted for key locations in the Man Of Steel’s fictional world. Of course, at the age of seven, I tended to take everything Hollywood presented to me at absolute face value; if the storytellers told me a thing was so, that was it, as far as I was concerned. So of course, when I saw a shot of the E. Clem Wilson building (in the earliest episodes of the show) or the Los Angeles City Hall (for the later stories), I knew that actually, they were the headquarters of the Daily Planet, the hallowed shrine of journalism in which Clark and Lois and Jimmy clacked away at Royal typewriters in pursuit of The Next Big Scoop.
Los Angeles City Hall, which followed the Wilson building as the second version of the Planet on the Adventures Of Superman TV series.
Of course, as a lad, I I knew nothing of the film industry’s century-long habit of saving a buck by using stock shots to stand in for something that they didn’t want to build from scratch. I saw exactly what they wanted me to see, and thought about it exactly how they wanted me to think. At that age, I certainly didn’t have any sense that film-makers, just like propagandists or documentarians, could make me look at an image and draw associations from it that had no root in fact. A few years later, as I stumbled into photography, I developed my own ideas on how to idealize the things I shot. Being a total noob, I thought everything I pointed my camera at was important, or beautiful, because that’s what the process of making a picture felt like to me. Years later, when I looked at my earliest “good” pictures, I was amazed at how truly horrible many of them were, and how, in my my mind’s eye, I had wildly over-inflated their value. Eye of the beholder and all that.
At this writing, in early 2025, yet another cinematic reboot of the Superman myth is being readied for the screen, and yet another visual symbol of the Planet building will be needed for the present generation. However, unlike the producers of Adventures Of Superman, who were bringing in every episode of the show at a rock-bottom budget of about $15,000, the new crew won’t have to settle for just shooting some random place and merely renaming it. CGI and other tools will make literally anything possible. And yet I still find myself going back to the L.A. City Hall, where, somewhere in one of the Planet’s vast corridors, there is that miraculous storage room into which Clark Kent disappears to become The World’s Mightiest Mortal. For my inner seven-year-old, you can’t get any more “real” than that. And that’s the superpower of photography. Superman may be able to bend steel in his bare hands, but a picture can twist reality to any purpose.
USER-FRIENDLY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE WORLD’S MOST TITANIC ATTRACTIONS, either natural or man-made, are almost always depicted from a distance, adorning postcards, brochures or posters from some ideal perch that allows the camera to take in the entire spectacle of The Very Special Thing within a single frame. That’s the way a tourist sees things like the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, or the Grand Canyon; the way they appear in the promotional photograph, the souvenir. For those locals who pass by or through those places daily at street level, however, the view is often very different, in that the part (the thing that I use) varies significantly from the whole (the thing the visitors visit). And that, in turn, provides the best way to see something ultra-familiar in a whole new way.
Example: seen as merely a single feature in a vast panorama that includes both the Brooklyn and Manhattan sides of the East River, the George Washington Bridge looks like a single, continuous flow of metal and macadam, when, in fact, it is a gigantic jigsaw puzzle of millions of interdependent parts…rivets, supports, struts, platforms, staircases, arches…a colossal collaboration of assemblies and sub-assembles. And, in photographic terms, forcing the eye to take in just a subsection of it, as seen here, forces the mind to take the familiar in as a totally unfamiliar thing, allowing for photographs that render an accepted form in a novel manner. It is, in effect, the anti-postcard view…a re-engagement of the senses with something long thought to be complete known.
Cities that attract tourists contain certain visual cues for the visiting photographer, or the urge to capture the super-familiar, to get “the” shot of certain locales. It’s almost as if snapping the expected photo of the Very Special Thing ticks off a box on a list of assignments. But homework and creativity don’t work well together. Struggling to find one’s one version of the super-familiar promotes growth, and, for the viewer, actually broadens our comprehension of that thing. “Nothing new under the sun”, goes the saying, but no one who calls him/herself a photographer can ever accept that proposition. Turn the corner, flip the angle, change the outcome.
“SAME DAY” BLUES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IT WAS JUST A HEARTBEAT AGO that I posted an appreciation of the current generation’s crop of camera sensors, trumpeting proudly how much easier it has become to capture high-resolution images, hand-held and on the fly, in greatly compromised lighting situations. I went on at some length (as I do) about how noise reduction, coupled with greatly expanded ISO ranges, had made it possible to salvage images that, just a generation ago, would have been lost, and I posted a shot taken within an extremely dark museum gallery that demonstrated my point.
Then I remembered this picture:
Same day, same inky black museum interior, nearly the same technical specs. To refresh, I was shooting that day on a Nikon Z5 full-frame mirrorless (so, a pretty recent camera) with a fully-manual, 24mm F-mount Nikon lens from the 1970’s. It’s attached to the body via a generic F to Z adaptor, so no information flows between the glass and the rest of the camera. The picture was taken wide open at f/2.8, just like most of my other shots for the day, and just like the humble-brag shot I posted several weeks ago from the same museum tour, which was remarkably noise-free and fairly sharp. Similarly, both shots were taken at 5,000 ISO.
So why is this take so much softer and…I dunno, smudgier? Well, that’s the kind of “what happened?” question that keeps one up at night. Lessee, there may actually have been less light to work with than in the first shot that I was so happy with. I could have mis-dialed the manual focus. Have I mentioned the possibility of gremlins or unclean spirits, i.e., a ghost in the machine? Meh. I can excuse the shot due to its general feel and composition, and perhaps pass it off as “painterly” which is a voguish catch-all alibi that loosely translates to “I screwed up but perhaps I can make you believe I did it with some higher purpose in mind”. Ah, well, as they say at Bowlero, set ’em up again in the next alley. Maybe next time I can make the 7-10 split….
LOST AND FOUND
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THIS PLATFORM WAS NEVER ABOUT MERE GEAR OR TECHNIQUE. Looking at the blogosphere of a dozen years ago, I decided that it was saturated with how-to’s and equipment reviews, things that I had found had less and less to do with how I was actually trying to make pictures. And so, from the start, The Normal Eye has been about intentionality. What was I trying to do? How close did I come? What was in me that had to change to make images “work” better? And what could I learn that might be helpful to others like myself?
One of the by-products of all this is that it’s taught me to look, photographically, for evidence of other people’s intentionality; to try to chronicle their magical transformation between thinking about a thing and becoming that thing. Take as an example the young dancer seen here, who began her improvised dance in the surf by randomly frolicking down the beach for a photographer friend. I happened upon the scene from afar, using a telephoto to maintain a healthy distance from the pair so as not to interfere with their process. And then I saw something wondrous.
Within a few seconds, the young woman went from letting a thing happen to her to trying, intentionally, to control and direct it. She went from participating to creating. She tore herself loose from the state of being “found” in something planned, to becoming blissfully “lost” in something of her own making. Whatever “this” was, it was no longer a series of poses. Now, it was a dance.
In a moment, I was reminded of what I had been seeking, millions of photographs ago, when I began all this. This blog’s name is subtitled with the word “journey” for a reason. I was learning, day by day, how to trust my own instincts beyond the mere technical mastery of a craft, dancing as intentionally as I could toward the edge of art. Sometimes, it still feels like I am just alone on a beach, twirling around aimlessly. But, in some miraculous moments, my footwork changes. I can hear a rhythm. I leave behind the “found” world and find myself giddily “lost”
And then I can dance.
THE ILLUSION OF AN ILLUSION
By MICHAEL PERKINS
LOS ANGELES’ ACADEMY MUSEUM OF MOTION PICTURES is, in a town veritably built upon buzz, one thing that more than lives up to the hype, a dazzling treasure house that celebrates the entire history of Hollywood magic-making. Packed with exactly what you’d expect from a century of trophy hoarding by the same folks who brought you the Oscars, the Academy Museum is the place where you go to catch an up-close encounter with Dorothy’s ruby slippers or Charles Foster Kane’s sled. But as amazing as the permanent collection at the AMMP is, the special exhibitions are even more astonishing.
An offer you can’t refuse, at least with a digital camera: f/4, 28mm, ISO 3200, 1/30sec, handheld.
One of the museum’s key attractions from 2024, ending early in 2025, is an entire wing honoring the 50th anniversary of the release of “The Godfather”. Some of the exhibits are of the standard museum variety, with costumes and fashion sketches of the main characters or an original script draft from Mario Puzo, complete with red-pen notations and revisions from director Francis Ford Coppola. The feature which, alone, is worth the price of admission, though, is a stunning re-creation of the set for Don Corleone’s office, the room where the first definitive sequences of the film are staged. Perfect down to the Nth detail, the area is the kind of stunt only Hollywood could pull off; the illusion of something that was an illusion in the first place.
What gives the entire set its greatest ring of authenticity, however, is the duplication of the minimal lighting that was used by cinematographer Gordon Willis, a deep universe of shadow that threatened to swallow everyone in a menacing murk. The veteran film maker had to drastically re-invent whole processes to get acceptable exposure on the severely under-lit set, and the Academy Museum’s replication of that atmosphere is what most excites visiting photographers. To get clear, noise-free results, handheld, with today’s digital sensors, most of which can crank their light sensitivity up to levels undreamed of in the film world of the early 1970’s…well, it’s like some nerd shooter’s fever dream. And Hollywood, in the worldly wise words of Sam Spade is, indeed, the stuff that dreams are made of.
HELLO, IT’S ME
By MICHAEL PERKINS
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
NEEDLESS DISCLAIMER DEPT: THE SELF-ABSORPTION OF HUMANS IS NOTHING NEW. Still, by itself, it can’t completely account for the virtual tsunami of photographic self-portraits that has flooded the cosmos over the last generation. Due mostly to the cell phone revolution, snapping yourself has never been technically easier. Additionally, the instant feedback of the digital era has allowed us ample opportunity to experiment, quickly and over a wider spectrum of results, making for more keepers, which, in turn, makes for more attempts, which….well, you get it.
What hasn’t always kept up, in the age of photographic narcissism, is how well we actually know our subject…that is, ourselves. You’d think that a lifetime of living inside our skin would give us a decided advantage on how to present ourselves effectively or honestly in an image, but you’d be wrong. I certainly can deliver a passable version of myself on those rare occasions when I try, although over the last decade I am making a lot fewer attempts, perhaps because I see such a chasm between what I’d like to look like and what I must, actually, look like to others.
The shot you see here is my first take on a “me” shot in about eight months’ time. This selfie drought is due in part to the fact that I’ve moved to a new town, and there is so much new stuff out there to shoot that I haven’t felt the need to turn the camera around. It’s also a measure of how “over it” I am with seeing my own visions of myself come up short. And, of course, there’s also the possibility that I am just not that fascinating a subject to begin with (hold your applause) and that I am naturally drawn to more compelling subject matter. It’s just really odd, this strange state of knowing so little about how to visually interpret the same clown you’ve seen in the mirror since you were tall enough to reach over the sink. Are all selfies partially true? Mostly lies? Interpretive delusions we’ve sold ourselves? Stark reminders of our limits or fragility? All of the above?
I see one hand raised in the back. Let’s you and I have a coffee and talk it over.
The rest of you are dismissed.
MY FAVORITE DESTINATION
By MICHAEL PERKINS
AS ALREADY STATED IN EARLIER EPISTLES from this little gazette, 2024 was, in every sense, The Year Of The Great Uprooting. In reality, we only moved one state over, from Arizona to California, but in a broader sense, we changed nearly every aspect of our daily lives. After twenty-five years in the Phoenix desert, we changed our entire life context by plunking down just ten minutes from the Pacific Ocean in the coastal town of Ventura. For a photographer, it was like being thrown into the middle of a three-ring circus of fresh visual stimuli; the best possible reset of the senses. It was if I had never seen mountains, or the sea, or farm fields before; I was living like a native but shooting with all the spastic zeal of a vacationer.
Still, with all that fresh fodder of making pictures, I find, on the last day of 2024, that my only possible choice for Most Important Photo Of The Year must, must, must be the candid of my wife Marian that you see here. In many ways, it’s the very definition of ordinary, in that I have shot hundreds of such images of her over our nearly twenty-five years together. However, the feeling that shot through as I happened upon her scrolling her phone in our new apartment, was the same one I get every time I feel compelled to grab a camera….an urgency, based on the belief that this moment must be saved.
Why not a shot of the beach or the hills ’round our new home for the “most important” of ’24? Because Marian is the real reason we landed here. It was her tenacity, her belief, her intense focus that kept me on task and fixed upon the final result during months of preparation; her conviction that, after years of daydreaming, we could actually make the leap to a new life. I am certainly a dreamer, at least when it comes to creative things, but I am something of a layabout, even a bit of a dimwit, when it comes to making practical arrangements. And so the look you see here, the slow-burning, sexy, amazing look I’ve enjoyed for decades, a perfect blend between serene beauty and keen awareness, jumped into my brain in the moment, jumping likewise into a very deep recess in my soul, reminding me why I decided, so long ago, that I had to have this woman in my life. As my life. And so, even though many scenic landscapes and local wonders from our new surroundings are sure to follow, this is the picture that defines the year, and so much more, for me. My favorite destination.
AT THE CORNER OF “WHAT THE” & “WHERE THE”
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHS ARE AS MUCH ABOUT CONDITIONS AS OBJECTS. The first grand age of picture-making was chiefly about documenting the physical world, recording its everyday features like waterfalls, mountains, pyramids, cathedrals. The earliest photographs were, in that way, mostly collections of things. Next came the birth of photographic interpretation, in which we tried to record what something might feel like as well as what it looked like. Conditions. Sensations. Impressions.
One thing that will invariably send me grabbing for a camera is when two seemingly disparate things create a unique relationship just by been juxtaposed with each other, as in the image you see here. The cheek-by-jowl relationship between the imposed order of Manhattan and the sacrosanct green space of Central Park has always been, to me, the ultimate study in contrasts. Acres of trees, lawns, playing fields, lakes, rolling hills, footbridges, and walking paths surrounded by a yawning, jutting canyon of steel and stone; the logic of the engineer yielding to the dreamy randomness of Nature.
The crags seen here just yards away from the skyscrapers of Central Park West look less like rock formations than the debris left after a war, as if the towers just beyond were somehow spared from an aerial bombardment. The contrast between order and chaos (and our shifting definitions of both of those terms) could hardly be sharper; so stark that, after shooting several frames of the scene in color, I decided that monochrome might better sell the entire idea of selective destruction, almost like unearthing an archived newsreel. The man on the upper left edge of the frame and the one standing alone in the gap between the rocks and the buildings both, to me, resemble the morning-after teams that might tour the damage a the previous night’s raid, salvaging what they can from the wreckage. Thus do photographs of things become documents of conditions, of the intersection between “what the” and “where the”. It’s a strange, and occasionally wondrous, juncture in which to find oneself.
New year-end galleries! Click on the tabs at the top of the page for new 2024 image collections.
SCENE OF THE CRIME
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY IS ONE OF THE ONLY AREAS OF MY LIFE in which I am never, ever really finished. Job over? No more visits back to see the old office gang. I’m gone. Move to another city? Lose my number. I won’t be back this way again.
10:0739am, 9/16/07 on a Sony DSC-W5; f/5.6, 7.9mm, ISO 100, 1/200 sec.
But making a picture of something just once, and leaving it at that? No, let’s think more in terms of a carousel. Miss the brass ring on one revolution? Get ready to grab for it on the next go-round. That landscape could be just a little stronger. That skyline could be improved by another try (or another three dozen tries, if I’m honest). It’s sad, but true; there aren’t but a few of the images I’ve made over a lifetime that I don’t imagine might be improved by a do-over.
That point was driven home to me again recently when I found myself walking past the precise spot in New York City where, in 2007, I first attempted a shot of the 30 Rock tower, the anchor of Rockefeller Plaza and pretty much on the bucket list of any visitor to The Apple. The original shot was passable, i.e., not truly embarrassing, and I even had an enlargement of it hanging in my workroom for more than a decade, having told myself that the image, basically a snap from a Sony Cybershot in full auto mode, was pretty much a home run.
11:0419a, 10/14/24 on a Nikon Z5; f/9, 28mm, ISO 100, 1/500 sec.
Zoom forward to two months ago, when, once more, I was standing along the southern side of Saks Fifth Avenue on East 49th Street looking across Fifth Avenue at the entrance to one of the two lesser plaza buildings that stand a block in front of the main tower. Even though I was now using a full-frame mirrorless Nikon Z5 with about a billion more options built into it, I shot the picture fast, just as I had done it in ’07. Later, I was struck at how many differences I saw in the two quickie snaps, fourteen years apart from each other.
Most noticeably, I had positioned myself much closer to Fifth Avenue in the re-do, eliminating the huge black block created in the original by the shadowy side of Saks, thus revealing more of the target. This closer framing also got rid of the light pole in the ’07 shot, which is either “urban atmosphere” or clutter, depending on your viewpoint. Of course, the Nikon is far more capable of delivering more nuanced color than the ancient Sony, and the custom settings I had dialed in to an assigned aperture priority button also helped deliver a wider overall range of tones than the earlier camera could ever dream of.
As to any other key differences, the verdict is yours as to what worked better when. I did not take the recent shot with a deliberate mission in mind; that is to say, I was not so much trying to consciously improve on the original, wanting instead to shoot the new frame quickly and instinctively, as I had done back in 2007, allowing whatever changed instincts I had accrued over the intervening years to dominate over any intentional calculation. It thus stands as a fairly honest testament as to the evolution of my style, or changes in how I “pre-see” a picture. Who knows? I may revisit the scene again in 2041, perhaps as the Ghost of Snapshots Past.
FROM THE VAULTS: TRUTH VS.REALITY (2017)
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ASKED IN 1974 BY AN INTERVIEWER ABOUT THE LEGACY OF THE ACTOR JAMES CAGNEY, director Orson Welles replied that while Jimmy “broke every rule”, “there’s not a fake moment” in any of his movies. He further explained that the star of Public Enemy, White Heat and Yankee Doodle Dandy worked counter to all the conventions of what was supposed to be “realism”, and yet created roles which were absolutely authentic. Cagney, in effect, bypassed the real and told the truth.
As do many photographers, it turns out.
We all have inherited a series of technical skills which were evolved in an attempt to capture the real world faithfully inside a box, and we still fail, at times, to realize that what makes in image genuine to the viewer must often be achieved by ignoring what is “real”. Like Cagney, we break the rules, and, if we are lucky, we make the argument that what we’ve presented ought to be considered the truth, even though the viewer must ignore what he knows in order to believe that. Even when we are not trying to create a so-called special effect, that is, a deliberate trick designed to conspicuously wow the audience, we are pulling off little cheats to make it seem that we played absolutely fair.
The first time we experiment with lighting, we dabble in this trickery, since the idea of lighting an object is to make a good-looking picture, rather than to mimic what happens in natural light. If we are crafty about it, the lie we have put forth seems like it ought to be the truth, and we are praised for how “realistic” a shot appears. The eye likes the look we created, whether it bears any resemblance to the real world or not, just as we applaud a young actor made up to look like an old man, even though we “know” he isn’t typically bald, wrinkled, and bent over a cane.
In the image above, you see a simple example of this. The antique Kodak really does have its back to a sunlit window, and the shadows etched along its body really do come from the slatted shutters upon that window. However, the decorative front of the camera, which would be fun to see, is facing away from the light source. That means that, in reality, it would not glow gold as seen in the final image. And, since reality alone will not give us that radiance, a second light source has to be added from the front.
In this case, it’s the most primitive source available: my left hand, which is ever so slightly visible at the lower left edge of the shot. It’s acting as a crude reflector of the sunlight at right, but is also adding some warmer color as the flesh tones of my skin tint the light with a little gold on its way back to the front of the camera. Result: an unrealistic, yet realistic-seeming shot.
There’s a number of names for this kind of technique: fakery, jiggery-pokery, flimflam, manipulation, etc., etc.
And some simply call it photography.
LET THERE BE (MORE) LIGHT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ASK THE AVERAGE PHOTOGRAPHER TO NAME THE GREATEST TECHNICAL ADVANCE of this general era and you will get an incredible range of responses. Given the breadth of technique out there, that’s to be expected. I have my own list of nominees, from lenses to ergonomics to processing platforms, but the one thing that has produced the greatest boost to my work is the superior light gathering power of today’s cameras, a revolution that dates to the first days of digital. That comes down to ISO, and how intuitive and simple it has made every kind of photography.
Consider this image. There is absolutely nothing artistically distinctive about it, but it is nonetheless remarkable, because, just twenty short years ago, it would have been nearly impossible for me to take it in the same way I can take it today. It was captured inside a museum gallery where the only light available was illumination directly next to the exhibits; everything else was swallowed in darkness. It’s hand-held, shot at a 50th of a second, and the lens, a 24mm prime, is fully open at f/2.8. But those things alone cannot deliver a shot like this, unless you factor in the sensor’s light-capturing performance.
Attempting this photo in the analog era, I would have had to purchase the fastest film available, likely with a maximum ceiling of around 800 ASA, and would likely have also had to provide flash or some other illumination to get color registration at this level. A time exposure on a tripod would have helped simplify some of that, but there would have been no getting a sharp shot of the museum guide without a strobe. Overall, a recipe for fuss, gear, expense, and a high degree of unpredictability, especially for an amateur. But that, folks, was film. And speaking of film, cameras that used it could only use one speed per roll. To change to a faster film from shot-to-shot, a separate camera loaded with that specific kind of film would be needed. Not handy.
However, with today’s sensors and processing, shooting this at 5000 ISO is just a matter of dialing it up and doing it. High resolution, low noise, faithful color (since I can also just select the white balance that I want without intricate calculation….another plus)…..it’s all, reliably, just there. I can shoot fast, simply, and with no great mental pre-occupation or guesswork, meaning I can concentrate solely on getting the shot. What other technical innovation over the last generation can possibly compete with that?
Tools and approaches vary by the individual, of course, and no one tech revolution will solve all problems for everyone. But. But. We are quickly approaching the point in photography in which nearly every major obstacle to making exactly the images we want has been overcome. And if that’s not the biggest news ever, then I can’t imagine what is.
HAVE YOURSELF A SNAPPY LITTLE CHRISTMAS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
EVERY HOLIDAY SEASON SINCE 2014, THE NORMAL EYE has cast a nostalgic glance backward to the days when the Eastman Kodak Company was the undisputed titan of home photographic supplies and film. The supplies…the cameras, lenses and tools, were mainly sold just once; however, the film was sold and resold endlessly, as the company marketed the concept of capturing life’s most precious moments, convincing us, in fact, that an experience was not quite complete if it were not frozen in time on our billions of Brownies and Instamatics. And nowhere else was Kodak’s perpetual consumption campaign more powerful than at Christmastime.
Over many a yultide, Kodak introduced the point-and-shoot camera, the portable pocket camera, the first practical color print film, and the first affordable systems for producing slides and home movies. The holidays were always high season for get-togethers with loved ones, hence an amazing emotional lever for Kodak. It’s just not a family gathering without pictures, lots of them! And we’ve made it so fast, so convenient, so….normal. No skill our experience needed, encouraged the ads. Just put a Kodak under the tree (tagged with the company’s holiday mantra, “open me first!” and let the snapping commence. Something fun/happy/wonderful may escape into mere memory, so be ready with plenty of film. flash bulbs and batteries.
Kodak Christmas ads were equal opportunity guilt generators, with Mom and Dad sharing the responsibility for a complete chronicle of every happy moment. Pop busy putting together the model train for Junior? Then let Mother step in and catch a few candids of all the joy. Mom showing Sis how her new Tiny Tears doll works? Then it’s Papa to the rescue, immortalizing every instant of happiness.
Years past Kodak’s glory days, today’s photographic habits are now so ingrained that we can no longer separate experiences from the need to document them, often treasuring an image of how happy we were even as the actual details of that happiness fade to gray. But such is the strange contract we all have with photographs. They have been called “a lie that tells the truth”, and sometimes, some strange and wonderful times, that has to be enough. Incredibly, like some sort of Christmas miracle, sometimes it is.
IT’S ALSO ABOUT THE JOURNEY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
WE TALK A LOT IN THE PAGES OF THIS LITTLE GAZETTE about the difference between process and product, of the things that happen both in our intentions for a photograph and what we hope will be the final rendition. Both steps have their appeal, but I imagine that we spend most of our time thinking primarily about the destination of a picture; the journey to that point, not so much.
For me, birdwatching, which comprises an ever-larger part of my photographic output, is balanced almost perfectly between product and process, between how are we going to find what we’re looking for? and what will be do when we find it? Many birders are also shutterbugs, and so their “product” calculation is, in part, based on the physical mechanics of mastering their gear and settings….which is where I mostly find myself. That means I have to put more work into the “process” part of the equation; that is, not merely taking pictures of birds, but also trying to capture the anticipation and intensity of the people who are seeking them.
I often forget to, in a way, turn the camera around to see the watchers as well as the watched. It really should just half of a balanced approach, but it can actually slip my mind. The entire chronicle of the trip would, of course, include the personalities of the search party as well as whatever quarry we locate. Because, even on days of no birds (of which there are many), you are still spending quality time with quality people on a great walk. And that’s worth a click or two anytime. Product. Process. Both can generate compelling images.
SOME OF’s
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHERS, BEING MORE OR LESS AS HUMAN as the next guy, are given, at this time of year (December), to compiling “years in review” or “best of” lists, in an effort to encapsulate the previous twelve months and, who knows, make some sense of it all. Such rosters are the go-to crutch of editors around the globe, who lazily assign their worker bees the task of ranking the top rutabaga recipes, the greatest moments in sports, and, inevitably, their own or someone else’s top images.
I find myself at some disadvantage in trying to evaluate my own work, and so I steer away from “best of’s” and stick with “some of’s” instead. I don’t mind compiling galleries that illustrate what I lived through in a year’s time, but I shy away from assigning any absolute value to any of them. I usually take notice, for example, of the tabs that you see at the top of this page, which click to small photo essays on given themes, and I consider refreshing them from time to time, as I have just finished doing with the current choices you see up top. The photographs in these new tabs, Going Coastal, City, Sweet City ’24, and Westward On A Wing, are not intended to stand as my finest work, but merely a chronicle of what larger adventures shaped me between January and December 2024.
Just A Walk At Twilight, Ventura, California, 2024
The biggest change in my life, for example, was deciding to move to California after twenty-five years in Arizona. That has resulted in what I call oceanic immersion, or a glut of images captured near the Pacific Ocean. Going Coastal, then, contains no great artistic breakthroughs; it’s just that the subject matter, especially for a noob, has me, for the time being, under its spell. City, Sweet City ’24 celebrates my return to New York after an absence of over five years, a long stretch in my experience, and Westward On A Wing celebrates my current stage of development as a bird photographer, which also rounds out to about the last five years. Think of the tabs as diary entires, minus the mooning over that cute new girl at school or pressed prom flowers.
As I said at the top, I find myself quite inadequate to the task to determining what my “best” images are. I can really only attest to what has been engaging or fulfilling for me. That’s why it’s a hobby. And, as with all hobbies, I can never really be “done”, which suits me fine. I prefer a life that’s a process instead of a product, a work in progress, a snap away from either success or failure. It’s fun balancing on that edge.
STICK AROUND AFTER THE CREDITS
December 1, 2024, 6:06:50pm, Ventura Harbor Village, California. f/4.5, 1/20 sec., ISO 100
By MICHAEL PERKINS
BACK IN THE DAYS WHEN SOME A-LIST MOVIES WERE PRESENTED as so-called “road shows”, there was an inducement to get people to stay in their seats even after the picture ended. The road show treatment, reserved for such wide-screen wonders as Ben-Hur, How The West Was Won, Lawrence Of Arabia and other epics was created so exhibitors could command premium ticket prices on select films at select prestige theaters, grand palaces where the movies could be stretched into an entire evening’s entertainment. The show included music overtures before the film, the actual dramatic drawing of a theatre curtain, a mid-feature intermission (many of these pictures were quite long), and, after the end title, so-called “exit music”, an orchestral re-statement of the major themes of the score, used to accompany the audience’s departure. The music was so beautiful that it was not uncommon for people to keep their seats until it was finished. Hooray for Hollywood.
6:09:22. f/3.5, 1/80 sec., ISO 100
All of which I’m mindful of when trying to capture a sunset. Of course, we all want the big money shot of the blazing red/orange ball of sun just as it kisses, and then slips below, the horizon. But some of the best and most dramatic displays of light and color happen in the minutes after the ball drops. Some photographers actually prefer the sky’s “exit music” to the sun’s formal “the end”.
And I’m one of them.
The three shots, scene here, of a sunset on the first day of December in Ventura, California illustrates how dramatically, and rapidly, shifts in tone happen within just minutes after a sunset. The earliest frame up top sees the orange from the just-vanished sun radiating more than halfway up in the sky, blending into the last vestiges of a daylight blue. In the second, the red at the horizon has intensified, blending now into a deep purple at it tracks skyward. And finally, all the reds are receding, as a new, deeper blue begins to set the scene for night. All within the space of five minutes.
6:12:38pm, f/2.8, 1/125 sec., ISO 1600. Suddenly, it’s a blue world….
You get the idea. A blazing sun is spectacular at sundown, to be sure; however, the light show that follows, after the movie ends, is so wonderful, you may want keep your seat until the last bit of exit music fades…
FROM THE VAULTS: “Framing Memory”
( All twelve years of THE NORMAL EYE are archived, and you can easily search any month or year by clicking on “Post Timeline” at the very bottom of any page. Here, from December 2018, is a look at the history of the Kodak “Colorama” and its huge role in holiday traditions. )
THE IDEA OF AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHY, the once-revolutionary notion that virtually anyone could own a camera and produce good results with it, came about at the exact point in history as the birth of mass-market advertising. Inventors made it possible for the average man to operate the magic machine, and wily promotion made him want to own one, and, by owning, adopt the habit of documenting his entire life with it. Some companies in the early days of photography excelled in the technical innovations that ushered in the amateur era, while others specialized in engineering desire for the amazing new toy. And no company on earth combined both these skills as effectively as the Eastman Kodak Company.
A super-sized Kodak “Colorama” transparency from the 1950’s.
From the beginning of the 20th century, Kodak’s print ads used key words like “capture”, “keep”, “treasure”, “preserve”, and, most importantly, “remember”, teaching generations that mere memories were somehow insufficient for recalling good times, or somehow less “real” without photographs to document them. The ads didn’t just depict ideal seasonal tableaux: they made sure the scene included someone recording it all with a Kodak. Technically, as is the case with today’s cel phones, the company’s aim was to make it progressively easier to take pictures; unlike today, the long-term goal was to make the lifelong purchasing of film irresistible.
Kodak’s greatest pitch for traveling the world (and clicking off tons of film while doing so) came from 1950 to 1990, with the creation of its massive “Colorama” transparencies, the biggest and most technically advanced enlargements of their time. Imagine a backlit 18 foot high, 60 foot wide color slide mounted along the east balcony of Grand Central Terminal. Talk about “exposure”(sorry).
Sporting the earliest and often best color work by Ansel Adams and other world-class pros, Coloramas were hardly “candids”. They were, in fact, masterfully staged idealizations of the lives of the new, post-war American middle class. The giant images showed groups of friends, young couples and family members trekking through (and photographing) dream destinations from the American West to snow-sculpted ski resorts in Vermont, creating perfectly exposed panoramas of boat rides, county fairs, beach parties, and, without fail, Christmas traditions that were so rich in wholesome warmth that they made Hallmark seem jaded and cynical. It was a kind of emotional propaganda, a suggestion that, if you only took more pictures, you’d have memories like these, too.
More than half a century on, consumers no longer need to be nudged to make them crank out endless snaps of every life event. But when personal photography was still a novelty, they did indeed need to be taught the snapping habit, and advertisers were happy to create one dreamy demonstration after another on how we were to capture, preserve, and remember. The company that put a Brownie in everyone’s hand has largely passed from the world stage, but the concept of that elusive, perfect photo, once coined “the Kodak Moment”, yet persists.
WONDER WHAT THEY MEANT BY THAT…..
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY, BY ITS VERY NATURE, pulls things not only out of their time, imprisoning them in a perpetually frozen state, but also out of their context. Extracted from all the other elements present at the time the shutter snapped, a subject must be judged on its own visual merits. It may, indeed, suggest the other conditions that prevailed when it was in the world; that is, a view of the Empire State implies the unseen remainder of the city skyline in which it exists; however, being captured in a photograph can just as often isolate an object or a person, robbing the eye of what it meant in the flow of regular reality.
Museums operate much like photographs, in that they create exhibits of things that have lost their overall context. We learn what we are looking at through explanatory texts or captions displayed near them, but the complete world the things once inhabited is removed. This forces us, as in a photo, to interpret their visual value to us. Sometimes they become diminished, while in other cases, their force actually increases. In visiting museums, I weigh a lot of factors, from empty spaces to shadow play to composition, but I am predominantly drawn to exhibits because the items in them are no longer merely what they were. My camera can thus contort their reality in a million different ways.
Birds are a prime example. As a birdwatcher, I see living creatures that inhabit an entire ecosystem of activity and place. As a guest in a museum, however, I see them in their corporeal form, perfect, in fact, in every detail, but now just objects to be arranged, lit in a particular way, or even abstracted. They become clay in my fingers, recognizable as birds, certainly, but capable of calling up a host of different associations. I can look at them and imagine majesty, mythical power, menace, or a mixture of all three. It reminds me that pictures are created long before the click, and that no two people can frame up the same subject and get the same result. I know what I mean, but figuring out what you mean, well, that’s the wondrous variance that keeps photography a perpetually unfolding mystery.
AT-BATS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ART IS AN ACT OF FAITH, an affirmation of everything we hope the world to be. To make art is to make good on every gift we’ve ever been given, re-circulating the fresh air of the inner soul through our nostrils and back out into the world through the breath of creation. Art is never merely talent, nor craft; it is far mightier than those things, powerful enough to transform shadows into sunlight, despair into prayer.
Art is the sustaining nutrition of the soul.
Photography, among other arts, has always had the power to transport me somewhere beyond my immediate cares, beyond the arbitrary agendas of any outside authority or regime, indeed beyond time itself. With my eye to the viewfinder, I feel at one with every other act of Creation that has preceded me. I also feel at one with the twelve-year-old version of myself that first picked up a cheap plastic Imperial Mark XII camera (retail cost: $7.00, with flash attachment) and yearned for better results. That yearning has never stopped, nor has the desire to begin afresh from nothing and make something, hopefully something honest.
And so, on this Thanksgiving Day in 2024, I continue to be grateful for every new chance to take my at-bats, to again face the pitcher. Because ideas are limitless; opportunities to capture them are infinite; and because I live in a world where most things, most truly important things are a gift. In the words of the old song….
The moon belongs to everyone
The best things in life are free
The stars belong to everyone
They gleam there for you and for me
The flowers in spring, the robins that sing
The moonbeams that shine
They’re yours, they’re mine
And love can come to everyone
The best things in life are free
PRODUCTION FOR (RE) USE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHERS TOGGLE BETWEEN TWO APPROACHES TO SUBJECTS, two very distinctive ways of justifying something’s place in a picture. The first, which almost exclusively defined the first age of the young art, was largely about documentation, creating the first visual chronicle of human experience. This surge of reportage resulted in a huge spike in tourism and travel in the 1800’s, immortalized in the billions of post cards and stereo views that “covered” the entire world. We mapped the globe to give everyone their first look at what was going on in the lives of everyone else, with magic lantern presentations and illustrated lectures on the pyramids, the Parthenon, a real, live Indian elephant. We catalogued.
The other approach to subject matter is far more abstract and interpretive. We mechanically capture an object in the same way, but we gentle massage composition, light and lenses to suggest all of the things that it might be, not merely what it is in nature. In this kind of picture-making, we ask the viewer to suspend their instinctual judgement of what they’re looking at and share in the shooter’s idea of all the things that it suggests. In such a situation, to know what a subject actually was designed to be, or do, is actually rather, well, dull, compared to what the mind, freeing itself, will allow it to become. If I were to open up a discussion, for example, on what the true use of the structure shown in the above frame was, just given what’s shown in the image, I’d likely open up a pretty rangy chat, whereas, if I were to photograph the same thing in the context of its intended purpose, it would serve as a document, but not as a point of departure.
Both approaches to material, either the prosaic and the poetic, can make for compelling photographs. As is usually the case, the photog sets the terms of engagement, and decides what kind of conversation he wants to start.
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( Note: THE NORMAL EYE is an archive of every article posted on this blog over its first twelve years. To search for posts from any month or year clear back to 2012, just scroll to the very bottom of any page and click on “Post Timeline”. )
ONE-ARMED PHOTOGRAPHY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
COLOR HAS NOW BEEN THE DEFAULT PLATFORM FOR NEARLY EVERY PHOTOGRAPHER FOR SO LONG that many (not all) of us tend to think of monochrome as some kind of deficit, that “real” pictures must, reasonably, be in color. It’s as if, having once put sugar on our corn flakes, we can’t imagine downing a bowl without that sweetness hit, or that trying to tell an effective story in a mono image is like tying one arm behind our backs. MONSTROUSLY HUGE DISCLAIMER: this is NOT the belief of millions of us who still shoot in black and white. I am grading a BIG cultural curve here….
To me, the two mediums are like recipes. One uses a sumptuously wide variety of spices, accents and seasonings to create a rich, full-bodied dish. The other uses a small list of ingredients, but can also result in intense flavor. Neither has a culinary edge or skillbragging rights over the other. In the use of monochrome, it’s all down to approach, which, for me, at the advanced age of 768, means calling on memories from when shooting that way was simply the only feasible choice.
That Wednesday At The Wharf, November 2024
Color was already in rapidly increasing use when I first crawled out of the photographic womb, but the default usage, globally, was still too mono. It was cheaper, for one thing. Also, there were many more people walking around who had trained when there was no other way to go, and their habits informed those of people like me, who were newbies at the time. So, now, when I deliberately conceive a b&w shot, I ask myself what, in that shot, I can achieve without color, or, more precisely, what impact mono will deliver for me that color would needlessly complicate or distract from. I find that if I ask myself, if I were forced to shoot this in mono, how would I make the picture work? Or, more pointedly for fossils of my vintage, how did I use to approach this?
There is nothing more counter-intuitive than a subject like the seaside. There is just so much that scrams at you to “capture it all”, or, in other words, grab every shade and hue of color. But, the fact is, once upon a time, I went to beaches with a basic Kodak and Verichrome film and somehow made at least some pictures that I was happy with. Can I still do that? Photography is a wonderful creative experience because of its blend of scientific surety (if you press this, the camera will do this), and the uncertainty involved in making anything aspiring to art (is this the right approach? Are my instincts correct?). What keeps the whole thing exciting is in trying to get the confidence/anxiety mix just right.
Or understanding that not everything’s black and white.
Unless you want it that way.
thenormaleye 
