OPEN WIDE AND SAY AHHHH
Handheld inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, NYC. f/2.8, 28mm, ISO 1000, 1/50 sec.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
1960’s COMMERCIALS FOR THE SWINGER, Polaroid’s first entry-level instant camera, marketed mostly to teens, showed how easy it was to achieve good exposures, simply by twisting the knob that supported the shutter button. Too dark, and the word “NO” would appear in the viewfinder. Twist to tweak, and the display turned to “YES”. Many flubbed fotos later, we all learned (at substantial expense) that it really ain’t that simple. And in the years that followed, with better and better cameras, we still seemed to be getting a “YES” from our gear, only to find that the resulting image was definitely a “NO”.
The reason for all this reminiscing is the completely different experiences I’ve had in recent years taking shots that, just a while ago, were almost guaranteed to fail, but which now succeed, and amazingly well. You know the kind I mean; those extreme pockets of darkness and gloom where light goes to hide and pictures go to die. In my early DLSR days I did my best to harvest a higher percentage of them, working with that format’s smaller sensors, the fastest prime lenses I could afford, and higher ISO settings. Working on a tripod made even more of such shots possible, but those were always in the minority of overall frames. Let’s face it; unlike Ansel Adams, who could work all day waiting for the right shadow to hit the side of El Capitan, we largely live in a hand-held world. I got a lot of “NOs”.
Just before curtain at Broadway’s Herschfeld Theatre. Hand-held at f/2.8, 28mm, ISO 2000, 1/100 sec.
After switching to a full-frame sensor and allowing for the tech to catch up in terms of more evenly rendering high-contrast subjects, even straight out of the camera, I find that the list of “undoables” is a lot shorter than it used to be, as witness the two shots in this article. Both are done with a 28mm lens wide open to f/2.8; both are handheld; both are taken inside locales (a cathedral and a Broadway theatre) known for harboring deep, deep pockets of shadow, often leading to dark patches that swallow detail or light areas that tend to blow out. Amazingly, minus a few minor color corrections, neither shot has been corrected in post.
In the days of our first cameras, we largely shot on an “if come” basis. If we did everything right to second-guess every technical tiger trap that was part of the process of calculating the shot, the picture might “come”. Maybe. And now, the carefree joy of picture-making which Polaroid promised back in the days of mini-skirts and paisley, a real closing of the gap between the imagining and the realizing of an image, might finally be imminent.
It’s enough to make you feel like a Swinger.
ALL ROADS LEAD TO EVERYWHERE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
OVER THE LAST QUARTER-CENTURY, ONE OF THE PERSISTENT BIASES THAT HAS HELPED CONVENTIONAL CAMERAS HOLD THEIR OWN against the tidal wave of cellphone-based photography has been the belief that there is some unbridgeable gulf between the amount of sophistication and control of old-school gear and the pocket-sized options of the average iPhone or Android. This belief has long helped the traditional camera manufacturers maintain a slim market edge over their upstart rivals. But if that belief was once justified, it is less so, now than ever before, and soon it will become merely a superstition.
Cellphones have exploded because they solve most of the problems that most regular photographers have with most of their shooting situations. And they do it intuitively, often instantaneously, and, in many cases, at a fraction of the cost of trad cameras. We are fast approaching a time when great, not merely satisfactory pictures, are obtainable universally, across all price points and platforms. Put simply, you may be buying a conventional machine simply because you like it better, rather than because it performs some magic that a mobile device can’t. In terms of getting the shot, we are almost at the point where all roads lead to everywhere.
To make a very specific comparison on an occasionally useful effect, i.e., selective focus, check out the image at the top, which was made on a Lensbaby Composer II with a “Sweet 35” optic. This particular art lens is designed to render a portion of the image sharply, with graduated blur surround that sweet spot. The optic can be rotated to place the sharper portion anywhere within the frame, and changing apertures will control how big the sweet spot is. This was shot at f/5.6.
Cost for both these components is well in excess of $250.
Now, consider the shot seen above. It was shot on an iPhone SE Generation 2 but the original image was in uniform sharpness. It was then processed in-phone with the Hipstamatic app, which offers options for “depth of field”, which, with a squeeze of two fingers, allows any part of the shot to be left sharp while the surrounding area goes to blur. If you louse up the placement of the sweet spot, you just re-do it in real time until you like it. The size of said sweet spot is likewise controlled by your fingers.
Cost: Well, you already own the phone, so all you need is the Hipstamatic app. In-camera purchases are available to emulate a variety of “lenses” and “films”, but the DOF tweak comes with the app, which is free. Yeah.
Are the two images identical in every respect? Of course not. BUT you tell me, or, more importantly, tell yourself what the answer is for you, for how you shoot, for the look you’re going for, what convenience means to you, and, most importantly, what your current concept of your “serious” or “real” camera is to you. It’s down to results, and, these days, results can be found nearly anyplace, using nearly anything.
BACK INSIDE THE HEARTBEAT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I SPENT MY ENTIRE LAND-LOCKED OHIO CHILDHOOD longing to wander the concrete canyons of New York City.
I ordered things from the Big Apple just to see the return address on the packages that came to my little suburban Columbus house, as if I needed regular assurance that the Gotham of myth, the New Yawk of movies and music and literature, was an actual place. I was nearly forty before I got to make my first trip there; I was creeping up on fifty before it became a semi-regular destination, thanks to my having married a girl who grew up on Rockaway Beach and to whom “the City” was just a subway ride away. Better still, her sister and daughter still lived there, giving us a readymade excuse to leave the torrid flats of Arizona for regular recharges from the World’s Biggest Battery.
As you read this, I will finally have been able to visit Manhattan for the first time in five years, much of that dry spell enforced by the monastic life was all adopted during Covid. During the worst of the pandemic, which assaulted NYC with the force of a tsunami well before it hit the rest of us, I used the city as a flickering candle of resilience that we all prayed would not be snuffed out, posting images of the town from my archives nearly everyday on Facebook along with as much rah-rah encouragement for her resurrection as I could muster. Now, I am back inside the heartbeat, arriving in the season that is the most reflective for many, as it was for songwriter Vernon Duke:
Autumn in New York
Why does it seem so inviting?
Autumn in New York
It spells the thrill of first-nighting
Glittering crowds
And shimmering clouds
In canyons of steel
They’re making me feel
I’m home
I love turning my eye in all directions to try to capture the city’s drama, its grandeur, its errors, its untamed, electrical energy. In a city that never sleeps, I also want to remain awake; I might miss something. And sometimes, the boy inside me snaps the shutter purely out of instinct. Because, really, I’ve had all the pictures inside my head my entire life.
They’re making me feel I’m home.
‘TIS THE SEASON. ANY DAY NOW.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MANY YEARS BEFORE I MYSELF MOVED TO CALIFORNIA, I heard reference to “soft seasons”, or a condition in which the four major quadrants of the natural calendar kind of mushed into one another like melted crayons. Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter no longer were distinguished by a hard, defined marker, as was the case in my native Ohio. I’d ask a CA native if they had winter, for example, and he’s reply, “we sorta have winter.” As I write this, I’m heading, for the first time in five years, back to New York City, where they definitely have fall and then definitely have winter. So seasons are where you find them, giving some of us a strange neutral-gear sensation that is now replicated in how we celebrate holidays. From now (today is October 7) to New Years’ Day, we are sorta in a holiday season, with a much blurrier distinction between the major celebrations than ever before. Happymerry Hallogivingmas, everyone!
Go into any store at this time of year and you will see holidays that used to have their own distinct lane suffering a dizzying case of merging traffic. In the case of this image, the spooky costumes of October are already being shoved out the door ahead of the Yuletide onslaught, something that old buzzards like me love to include on our “It Ain’t How It Used To Be” playlist. Having taken this picture, however, I am already puzzling as to why I did. Is this commentary? Humor? Protest? Is this even a good photograph, or is what’s seen here already so commonplace as to be banal? Do we need one more ticked-off geezer saying everything’s too commercial?
I mean, we all know why this happens. Retail needs more and more time to “make” its fiscal year, and the fourth quarter is the field on which that battle happens. Spending forecasts for the last three months of the year are nervously trotted out well before Labor Day, forcing retailers to stock as much as they can cram onto the sales floor, as early as they can. And now that I read back this paragraph, I have the answer to my earlier question as to whether this picture even needs to exist, or serves any purpose. Of course, I ask the same question about every picture I make. It’s just that I’m usually happier with the answer. Hand me the chocolate-covered turkey gingerbread, willya?
A SHOT IN THE DARK
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ONE OF THE MAJOR DINGS IN THE SIDE OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY in its earliest days, and something which gave analog haters a legit gripe against the emerging technology, was the narrow dynamic ranges of some of the first sensors. The full spectrum of exposure from light to dark was simply not represented in the earliest digital cameras, giving rise to more than a few smug “see? we TOLD you film was better” editorials. One of the first remedies to the problem, as we waited for the tech to catch up, was the fix known as HDR, or High Dynamic Range processing. Maybe you toyed with it; maybe you embraced it; and maybe you recoiled from it in horror. Fact is, it caught on big, and, by the time of this writing it is….well, less so.
The idea was simple. Just take several bracketed exposures, from dark to light, of the same subject in rapid succession, then stitch them all together in programs like Photomatix, tweaking the lows and taming the highs until you got a balanced composite. HDR was capable of rendering a variety of looks, from passably real to ultra-real to what I call Tolkien Fever Dream, with a heavy emphasis on enhanced sharpness. Soon, manufacturers, from conventional cameras to iPhone variants, hurried to bundle HDR generating software into their designs, simplifying the process, if not always achieving the same results.
But yesterday’s essential hack is today’s bygone parlor trick. The image at top, made in 2010, is a Photomatix blend of seven different exposures, all taken on a tripod, inside as especially light-starved church in Monterey, California on a crop-sensor Nikon D60. The second image is a single, hand-held exposure inside an equally darkly church, taken on a full-frame Nikon Z5 in August 2024. A minor amount of shadow rescue was needed, and, of course there was some blowout on the stained-glass windows, but essentially this shot is straight out of the camera.
The facts on the ground have simply changed in a mighty big way. Sensors in nearly all cameras are much larger in 2024 than at the beginning of the digital era, resulting in a much wider dynamic range in even modest gear, and making for much more balanced exposures regardless of conditions or subject. This simply makes all the prep and mechanics of HDR manipulation unnecessary, rendering the process an art effect, or just another interpretive tool for special occasions. Once again, the forward march of technology works to remove more and more obstacles between the photographer’s vision and his machine’s ability to deliver that vision, a trend that began when the first Kodak Brownie enabled average shooters to make a predictably reliable picture with the touch of a single button over 100 years ago. Allowing photogs to get out of their own way, and to concentrate primarily on what they see in the moment….that is progress.
THE YEAR OF THE “GO” PILE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THIS SPRING SAW THE CURTAIN RUNG DOWN ON OUR LIVES IN PHOENIX, ARIZONA. Marian had stuck it out in the Valley Of The Sun for thirty-three years; I put in twenty-five. We were both, as the young say, “over it” for some time prior to our move to California, but we had to wait until all the planets and stars lined up along with our retirement options to give us an escape window. What made the final phase of this strange was that, after decades of dreaming about The Final Day, we found the end-stage events leading up to it to be traveling at light speed. At the end of a looooong stretch of “wait”, we were fired out of a big “now” cannon.
I didn’t chronicle the entire project. On most days. there was simply too much to do in too short a span of time to stop to pick up a camera. We had about three furious weeks to finalize our new lease in Ventura, sort 3,000 square feet of earthly goods into a take-with pile comprising about half that space, hire and direct the efforts of an estate sale agent, get the surviving stuff packed and trucked westward, re-carpet the entire empty house, meet our transferred junk on the other end, and supervise the sale of the house through phone, fax and email. As I say, not a lot of time for snaps.
The scene here is something of a mish-mosh, in that it’s an early study of what-goes-what-stays, done before any final decisions for any of it were made. Hence, I can pick out objects, here and there, that we actually brought with us, some that went to estate sale, some that had yet to be ruled on, and a few things we thought we could sell that eventually went to charity. The reason this photo recently bobbed back up into my consciousness was because Marian and I are presently in the “did we leave that behind, or did we pack it?” phase, which looks as if it will go on for the next immediate….millennium. There were other photos made during the madness, including many tabletop commemorations of school and art projects by her two children going back over thirty-some years. Every museum isn’t a house, but every house is a museum. I could sum this all up by saying something philosophical about how little you can live with once you make a few tough calls, but I don’t want to congratulate myself too much while I am still occasionally opening boxes filled with “why the hell did I bring this…..?”
PARALLEL TRACKS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I’VE SPOKEN IN THESE PAGES BEFORE about the obligation and/or honor of photographically chronicling my ninety-five-year-old father’s last years, of being torn between wanting to create an honest, unvarnished record of his gentle but inevitable decline, and feeling duty-bound to also make the most reverent images of him possible for a family that will never really be ready to say goodbye to him.
It’s one massive juggling job, much of it done with a very solid lump in my throat. It’s chronicling a single human life along parallel tracks with dual versions of itself.
As a photographer himself, Dad raised me to be as visually alert and as honest as possible. He taught me that there is no such thing, for example as a “line” in nature, that what we call that thing is actually just a difference in the kind of light that meets two adjoining surfaces. That interpretation means respecting what you see but also extracting what’s not readily visible as well. Were he still able to see well enough to make pictures himself, I’d like to hope that he would support a version of him like the one seen above. I didn’t seek his permission. I had him in most cases totally to myself, and quietly, candidly made the images I felt needed to be made, but of two minds.
The second “mind” regards the way we would all prefer to think of him as his candle flickers. It’s taking the measure of the same face, maybe even on the same day, but with the benefit of a fresh shower and sunshine instead of cold overcast and emotional exhaustion. It’s as close to the difference between day and night as photographs can be. Both have their truth. Both have their special place in the heart.
Not every one will agree with both of these series of photos. Either they will regard one as too cruel, or they will see the other as too candy-coated. Maybe some would reject both. But if Dad taught me anything at all, he taught me to make something as well as you can. Well enough that you are proud to put your name to it at the bottom, to, in fact, testify, if you will, that you did it, you own it, you believe it. I hope I learned the lesson well enough for at least that.
QUEER QUBISM
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MORE AN INSIDE-OUT THAN OUTSIDE-IN PROCESS. We tend to think that the images we capture just sort of seeped or flooded their way into our cameras, but, just as often, we begin with a desire behind our eyes that then pours itself outward into the lens. Point of view is the real determinant of how a picture will be created: the thing is never really as simple as pointing at something and shooting. Where we stand, our choice of tools, our intuitive interpretation…these make or break a picture.
In recently shooting the “Canopy Walk”, a new treetop-height attraction in Reynoldsburg, Ohio’s Blacklick Woods Metro Park, I found myself confounded by the rangy, twisty contours of the platform. None of my standard lenses seemed able to corral the thing into a single frame, and, after several attempts to tell its story in that fashion, I switched gear completely and opted for an approach I can only call cubist.
The widest lens I have in my kitbag is a TTArtisan 11mm lateral fisheye, which can enable more than one plane of view at a time, similar to cubist work from Picasso and other painters who felt imprisoned by the standard flat image and tried to suggest all sides of their subjects (left, right, over, under, etc.) by simply painting it that way, and “reality” be damned. The fisheye gives a photographer much the same freedom, as, in this image, we’re looking both down onto the forest floor, as if shooting from above, and up to the bottom of the platform, as if looking skyward. The lens also creates the illusion of looking around corners that would appear like hard angles in viewing them with a standard optic, plus both compressing and exaggerating spaces as they are twisted into strange mutations of their actual dimensions. The overall sensation is one of bigness, but a surreal kind of bigness, a design sprawling out of control. Like a cubist painting, the image is one of disorientation, a deconstruction of reality.
Or maybe it’s just a weird picture.
As is always the case, there is either a connection between my own queer cubism and the viewer’s tolerance, or there isn’t. The idea of making a picture isn’t really to have the final say but to have the first say, and then get a conversation going. Where we meet, or don’t meet, on each others terms of what “art” is can be frustrating or fun, actual or true.
ANOTHER OPENING, ANOTHER SHOW
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE GOLDEN AGE OF CINEMA THEATRES, which saw its high tide during the glory days of the silent era, placed grandiose entertainment palaces within the reach of the common man from one end of America to the other, bestowing gilded temples, dripping with over-the-top ornamentation, on towns large and small. These grand retreats, awash in velvet curtains and cavernous prosceniums, recalled the lavish excesses of Aztec, Spanish, Greek and Moorish architecture, and served as gathering places where more than movies were on display. They were fantasy worlds in plaster and gold leaf.
By the end of the ’20’s, the era of the huge operatic movie palaces had mostly cooled, with a secondary crop of smaller venues dotting the map in tinier towns. By 1929, when the Boulevard theatre opened in the small farming community of Oxnard, California, there was a greater emphasis on streamlined Art Deco exteriors, spare ornamentation, and simple inner auditoriums. The Boulevard served for many years as the city’s only theatre, switching to Spanish language films in the ’60’s in order to survive a general downturn for neighborhood screens. By the 1990’s, the shuttered Boulevard had long since been renamed the Teatro, its old popcorn machine mouldering in the lobby and its seats an occasional refuge for the homeless. But as one curtain was ringing down for the building, another was about to go up.
Oxnard, California’s Teatro Boulevard Theatre, frozen in pastel time, 2024
In 1995, recording engineer Mark Howard, taking a turn through the town, which was, at that time, right off the Pacific Coast Highway, spotted a “for lease” sign on the Teatro’s marquee and thought it might make for the kind of makeshift recording site which he favored over traditional studio setups. He suggested the idea to producer Daniel Lanois, already famous for having shepherded classic albums like U2’s Unforgettable Fire, Peter Gabriel’s Us and Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy, and the two began a five-year collaboration on a series of recording projects that also had the effect of rehabilitating the latter-day careers of veteran rock and country legends. Among the best: the demo sessions for Dylan’s 1998 masterpiece Time Out Of Mind (which was actually finished in Miami) and Willie Nelson’s aptly titled Teatro, which featured an album cover picture of the theatre entrance very like the one I shot here.
After Howard and Lanois went their separate ways, other artists continued to seek out the Teatro, including Emmylou Harris, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and, most notably, Neil Young, playing with WIllie Nelson’s sons Lucas and Micah on The Monsanto Years, a protest about industrial farming practices in Southern California in towns like Oxnard. Today, the Teatro is again seeking a sponsor, its current owner dreaming of converting it to a live music venue, studio, or both. The former Boulevard’s exterior is still proud, elegant and colorful, and pretty much ready for its third act. I can’t wait to see how the movie ends.
POST CARDS FROM MEMORYLAND
Dave Willardson’s classic album cover for The Beach Boys’ CARL AND THE PASSIONS / SO TOUGH (1972)
By MICHAEL PERKINS
SOMETIMES THE WORST LOCATIONS TO PHOTOGRAPH A SUBJECT are the places where the most admirers of that subject are gathered. To put it politely, people generally make composition of an image an uphill slog, crammed together as they might be to appreciate a hobby, an event, or a collectible. This is certainly true with that staple of the weekend festival, the classic car show.
It’s one thing to find a bygone ride that you adore. It’s something else entirely to visually have it to yourself, with your fellow fans ogling, leaning in, looking into, posing with, or merely passing by in packs. Shooting an entire car at once becomes a virtual impossibility, and so the car has to be, to varying degrees, abstracted, with tighter-framed sections of it standing in for the whole. This usually means a focus on the elaborate grills, exterior contours like fenders or fins, or, in the case of this image, a door/wing window/mirror panel on a Ford Country Squire station wagon. The SoCal sunshine on the day of the shot had already boosted the extreme colors of the treated wood trim and aqua body, making the old girl look like one of those hyper-processed “Greetings from L.A.” post cards, and might have made for a great view of the entire side of the car had the area not been clogged with humanity. So the challenge became: how little of the car can I show in a cropped shot and still sell the idea effectively?
Hop In, Kids, Oxnard, California, 2024
The answer actually came to me later, in the editing phase, when my mind traveled sideways to a great cover from the 1972 Beach Boys album Carl & The Passions/So Tough, which featured a similar viewpoint by airbrush painter Dave Willardson, whose work graced dozens of classic records in the early ’70’s. Being that he wasn’t confined to mere reality, Dave was free to show a few fantasy palm trees and a surfboard reflected in the driver’s-side window, but the great thing about his conception was how little of the total car he actually showed. I played around with my own shot and decided that less could indeed be more in my case as well. Fans of anything can mar the view of the thing most adored, but that doesn’t mean the thing can’t be effectively photographed. You just cut away everything that isn’t an essential part of the story. It’s a fun ride.
NOT REAL. JUST TRUE.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS, THE APP KNOWN AS HIPSTAMATIC BEGAN (in 2009) AS A BIT OF A CARNIVAL TRICK, back when mobile-based platforms for photo processing were the same kind of trendy novelty as custom phone rings. Just as it was fun, in the first heady days of iPhones, to replace the heads of your friends with squirrels or kitties, it was considered “crazy” that an entire app would be dedicated to simulating the look of various analog films or lenses. Hey, this is the digital age. Didn’t we just get rid of that stuff. What’s next, faux tintypes?
It’s Around Here Someplace, 2024. Master shot on an iPhone SE, post-processed with Hipstamatic “Jack London” lens and “Love 81” film filters
Well, of course, those came along, too…but the naysayers missed the point in thinking that a photog would only want to recall the look of Kodachrome or a pinhole lens just for the sheer weirdness of it. Turns out Hipstamatic and its many later imitators filled a need, just as, in another medium, a certain kind of brush or canvas might shape the final iteration of a painting, or a director may deliberately choose black-and-white as the better format for a feature film. Every era in photography has its own look, simply because the qualities, or even limits, of the recording systems in those eras had their own visual signatures. But if all Hipstamatic had provided photographers with was nothing more than the means to make new shots appear old, it would have rapidly faded. Instead, it became an interpretive tool, its digital filters shaping the outcome of pictures instead of just making another “version” of them. That makes Hipstamatic at least as legit for shooters as, say, silkscreening was for Andy Warhol. We’re talking tools.
International prizes for photography and journalism of Hipstamatic images by the likes of Francois Besch and the New York Times’ Damon Winter, awarded more than ten years ago, are no longer outliers. Certainly, many photo apps in the digital era are one-trick ponies or, worse, mere goofs, but the key to a tool’s survival is how many people decide to give it a permanent place in artists’ toolbox as a regular go-to or solution. If it’s used, it’s needed. If it’s needed, it stays.
KEEPING MY LUNCH DOWN
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I’M PRETTY SURE THAT MY FIRST-EVER DIGITAL CAMERA was the product of intense guilt. Allow me to explain…
For a while after my divorce and my move from Columbus, Ohio to Phoenix, Arizona, my ex and I persisted in buying Christmas and birthday gifts for each other, partly to convince ourselves that the break-up was amicable (it mostly was) and partly to delay admitting to ourselves that everything was, indeed, finished (boy, was it). And thus my introduction to digital photography, a puny Olympus Cambodia C-1, rocking an intense 1.3mp of raw power, arrived at my new apartment as a result of that awkward and protracted goodbye process.
At that point, early 2000, I was, like many people raised on film, still trying to decide if this whole digital deal was just a faddish toy, spiking its way into the pop culture stratosphere only to crash to earth with equal speed. I was far from impressed with the results from the camera, which I only occasionally picked up to play with, feeling I was obligated to at least try to like it since it was a guilt gift. The resolution topped out at a mighty 1280 x 960 pixels, rendering a barely acceptable image on a computer screen and absolute garbage for any print larger than a credit card. The Olympus was soon relegated to vacation snaps and candids only, with my “real” cameras doing the heavy lifting for any images that mattered.
But, of course, that changed, dinnit?
So ask yourself: what was the first digital image that you shot that was decent enough to share, or point to with any modicum of pride. For me, it was this Grand Canyon quickie, taken almost two years after I got the camera. This was the first inkling I got that, hey, this “dig-it-all” stuff might become something….someday.
Around this time, Chase Jarvis, a photographer who had made his professional bones shooting for accounts like Nike, Pepsi, Volvo and Apple (!), published The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You, a then-daring book of nothing but digital photographs shot on a two-MP camera on his phone. I was astounded at the audacity of the project: his results were as grainy and off-color and smudgy as my own….and he didn’t seem to mind. The entire point of the book was that you didn’t only shoot on days when you happened to pack your serious gear, but that you should free yourself by shooting whatever was in front of you, in the moment, with whatever was handy. It was a revelation/revolution for me as a shooter.
Suddenly I started reading up on the evolving state of digital…..who was switching to it, and why, and how the new medium was making its way into the mainstream. I had always known that stodgy old clubs like Arizona Highways or National Geographic would continue to cling to film as if it were the last copter leaving Saigon, but now I wanted them to justify that stance, to convince me that the old way still deserved to hold sway. My second digital camera, a Sony CyberShot sporting a screaming 5.1MP finally gave me pictures that evinced more smiles than winces, and I felt like a convert to a new religion. The deed was done and could not be undone. I was a digital guy.
In preparing to move westward to California several months ago, I spent far too much time poring over way too many photo files from my twenty-five years in Arizona, and the emotion I am experiencing most often is gratitude. I am grateful for the thousands of Ugly Duckling photos that eventually allowed me to occasionally produce a swan. As with all of the best in photography, you grow your gear after you’ve grown yourself, eventually hitting the plateau where you can make pictures with your best camera, which is, of course, the one that’s with you.
RE-EMBRACING THE RANDOM
By MICHAEL PERKINS
LIFE FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS HAS BECOME ENTIRELY TOO SAFE.
It’s to be expected, really. In recent decades the forward tsunami of technical improvement in cameras and editing options has almost completely “idiot-proofed” the process of making pictures. In nearly every possible scenario, today’s gear guarantees that you will at least get something usable every time you take a shot, and, in many cases, images that are far better than even your best efforts could have guaranteed just a few years ago. The risk of making visuall lousy photographs has been nearly zeroed out.
And that’s the problem. Because with the randomness of luck, which used to mean the potential for ruined images, there’s also the potential for the happy accident, the unplanned discovery that comes when something unpredictable is introduced into the mix. I was reminded of that in a recent return to the tabletop fun of light painting, where you shoot an object in complete darkness, with your camera set on full manual and mounted on a tripod. Using a remote shutter release for extra stability, you start the exposure on “bulb” setting, meaning that the shutter will stay open until you click it shut. You then selectively “paint” light onto the subject, passing over different parts of it with a small penlight. Unlike a static lighting scheme, this system more or less guarantees randomness, since you will never pass the light over the scene twice exactly the same way. And that very randomness affords you a kind of impulsive, instinctual indulgence from frame to frame.
I usually shoot anywhere from thirty to fifty frames when doing a light painting, as I am always surprised or inspired by how the smallest variation in my passes will drastically affect the results. I can literally make the light look like it came from any direction, with whatever intensity I desire, from deep shadows to total blowouts. I can even let the flashlight itself be seen in the frame to suggest motion or speed, as seen in the above shot.
Is it art? Well, in that randomness is an element of risk/reward in photography, I’d say that art occurs when you can’t absolutely nail everything down. It’s often considered an alibi to say, of one’s occasional errors, “hey, I’m only human”, but, in photography, the same phrase might actually be a valid brag.
A.B.W.T.B.S.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I AM NOT THRILLED WITH THIS PHOTOGRAPH.
However, it could have been a whole lot worse, in that it might never have been attempted at all.
We talk about “no day at the beach”, but on the day this was shot, that’s all I really wanted. My mood found me with no camera on my shoulder, a condition so weirdly rare that my wife, in her very New York sense of sarcasm, asked, “whaddya, sick?” Indeed, it’s not often that I go out photographically inert. I had a camera, but it was in a parked car, a quarter of a mile away from where we were walking. Then I spotted Mister Man here.
The cabled-off area you see in the top shot protects recovering sand dunes (they are living things, trust me) at California’s San Buenaventura State Beach from visitors who might otherwise tramp through them en route to the surf, which faces directly opposite. The approved entrances to the sea breach this dune “wall”, and we had walked through one of them from the parking lot just to walk off some tension when Marian’s binoculars picked up, not your typical gull or sandpiper, but a gorgeous peregrine falcon, apparently scanning the coast for a shot at lunch. “Can you get him?” she asked, even though she knew I was bare-handed. My heart sank. My telephoto was all the way back home, and the Nikon Z5 in the car was only fitted with a 28mm, far too wide for a proper portrait of the raptor. However, after a bit of fussing that the ideal was not possible, I opted for the real, walking back to the car to salvage what I could with the wide-angle.
More “crap” than “cropped”, but you can’t blame a gal for trying…
When we had been near the falcon beforehand, he seemed spook-proof, absolutely rooted to the spot. Passersby and beach patrol wagons had both failed to make him take flight, and, sonofagun, upon our return, he was still there, not flinching so much as a feather. I got as close to him as the steep bank of the dunes and the shifting sand would allow, inching within about twenty feet. Of course, in the view of the 28mm, he might just as well have been in the next county, but I took my shot (that is, about thirty of them). Better to have loved and lost than never to have blah blah blah.
The narrative of the shot, which even at a super-sharp f/16, could not be cropped enough for a really detailed portrait, shifted now, to be about the bird as the sole feature of interest in a wide, rolling terrain. And I can live with that. The old photographer’s advice to A.B.S. (always be shooting) sometimes translates to A.B.W.T.B.S, or “always be willing to be shooting”. No, I am not thrilled with this picture. But I am thrilled for the chance to have made the attempt. Any good batter knows that hits are a consequence of a huge-number of at-bats, most of which result in pop-ups and strike-outs. To get to the good stuff, you just gotta keep stepping up and taking a swing.
HURRY UP AND WAIT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE VERY NATURE OF PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE PURLOINING OF TIME, of snatching random instants from the continuous flow of zillions of moment-drops that compromises the tidal surge of life. We sneak out tiny frozen bits from this flow and lock them in a box, making the moments stand for the totality. Even two-plus centuries into this process, it ought to still strike us as a supernatural act, a miracle.
Because it is.
And since we’re treating time as something we can steal pretty much at will, we can take it a step further, using our cameras to customize the nature of the theft. In freezing an instant, are we snatching a sample of something that was lived in “real” time, or an unreal distortion of it, or a combination of both? In tweaking what is already an illusion (an abstraction substituting for the actual thing), images like this become easy:
Technically, making a picture in which time travels at several speeds at once is pretty much a snap (sorry). The “still” elements are shot at f/16, insuring sharp detail in the people on the bench. The passers-by in the foreground, by comparison, are in constant motion, and, with an exposure of just over 1/10th of a second (which is still “fast” enough to freeze the sitters), they are nearly transparent, and might even vanish into pure blur, were the exposure over, say, a second or so. Thus, in one picture, there are two contrasting captures of the passing of time, or whatever we like to think of as time.
Moreover, when, without a camera, we view this scene in what we fancy as “real time”, picture after picture’s worth of information is refreshed for our eyes every second, making both foreground and background figures appear, of course, to be equally solid, or “moving at the same speed”. What’s the take-home? That our cameras do not see the same way that we do, which makes them a fit instrument to show things that we cannot see without a little manipulation and/or magic. So, when someone says that “photography takes time” they are more right than they know. It takes it, and then it frees it from its bonds. The results are variable. Unpredictable.
Miraculous.
Of Hauntings Great And Small
By MICHAEL PERKINS
AS A PHOTGRAPHER, I TEND TO DIVIDE MUSEUMS into two general classes. The first includes the grand halls that act largely as warehouses for collections of disparate items from across history. The second consists of the more personal spaces that were actually once someone’s private dwelling, such as a presidential home or an historic manor. In the first class, the emphasis, at least for me, is on the visual appeal of individual objects, i.e., the mummy cases, caveman tools, etc. In the second class, the narrative lies in the physical space that surrounds the relics, that is, the feel of the house or structure itself.
When I am being conducted through a home where a great family raised its children, where its dreams and schemes were birthed, I of course am fascinated by their quilts, kerosene lamps, butter churns and such. But, since this was a place designed not as a housing for curiosities but as a place where actual people lived, I am interested in trying to show what it might have been like to personally occupy that space. What it was like to wake up with morning light streaming through a bedroom window. What the anticipation of callers felt like, viewing the back of the front door from the second-floor landing. What solitude a certain room might have afforded. Where glad and sad things happened.
Take me to the Met and I will want to see certain things. Take me to an old family home and I will try to depict certain feelings. In the frame seen here, I was lucky enough to be in a bedroom where the delicate lace curtains at left were bending slightly inward from the window, courtesy of a cooling breeze. I began to wonder what it might be like to wake in such a room. What you would see first. How the basics of the room could create a feeling of solidity or safety. My only visual prop was the washstand at right, but that was enough. The suggestion of a life lived was present in just those basics, uncluttered by the mash of curios and collectibles that filled many of the home’s other rooms. Museums sort of represent a variety of hauntings, and their spirits can often speak more clearly in sparse, open settings. It’s like a whisper that you have to teach yourself to listen for. And then the pictures come…..
SNEAKING WITHOUT SPOOKING
By MICHAEL PERKINS
No zoom on hand, and yet I see a potential story happening at the center of a very wide frame. Take the shot anyway? Abso-photo-lutely.
THERE IS A DELICATE BALANCE TO STREET PHOTOGRAPHY, which is really spywork of a kind. Just as wildlife shooters tread carefully so as not to flush birds to flight or startle feeding fawns, street snappers must capture life “in the act” without inserting themselves into the scene or story. Quite simply, when it comes to capturing the real eddies and currents of everyday life, the most invisible we are, the better.
Part of the entire stealth trick is about making sure that we don’t interrupt the natural flow of activity in our subjects. If they sense our presence, their body language and behavior goes off in frequently unwanted directions. Undercover shooting being the aim, then, it’s worth mentioning that such work has been made immeasurably easier with cel phones, simply because they are so omnipresent that, ironically, they cease to be noticed. That, or perhaps the subjects regard them as less than “a real camera” or their user as less than threatening somehow. Who knows? The thing is, a certain kind of visible “gear presence” is bad for business. That said, telephotos can become attractive simply because, shooting from longer distances, they are easier to conceal. But is that the One Best Answer?
Same story, severely cropped, but with more than enough sharp detail to deliver the central idea.
To carry as little gear as possible as well as keep things simple, I mostly do “street” shots with a fixed wide-angle prime lens, meaning that I simply won’t have a telephoto as an option, nixing my ability to hang back from a great distance undetected. And yet I seldom feel handicapped in staying fairly far from my subject and just shooting a huge frame of what could be largely dispensable/ croppable information once I locate the narrative of the shot within it. In fact, shooting wide gives me the option to experiment later with a variety of crop-generated compositions, while shooting at smaller apertures like f/16 on a full-size sensor means that I will still have tons of resolution even if half of the shot gets pared away later.
Another consideration: besides being bulkier/easier to spot, telephotos have other downsides, such as loss of light with each succeeding f-stop of zoom, or having problems locking focus when fully extended. Your mileage may vary. The top shot here was taken with a 28mm prime. about a hundred feet away from the water’s edge, but the cropped version below still has plenty of clean, clear information in it, and it was shot at half the equipment weight and twice the operational ease. These things are all extraordinarily subjective, but on those occasions when I come out with a simpler, smaller lens, I don’t often feel as if I’ll be missing anything. For me, the first commandment of photography is “always be shooting”, or, more specifically, “always take the shot.”, which means that the best camera (or lens) is still the one you have with you.
TO SEE THE SEA IN FULL
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I AM VERY NEW TO DAILY LIFE in California. After decades of longing to convert my occasional doses of this marvelous state into the stuff of everyday experience, to go layers beyond mere vacation sensation, Marian and I have actually done it, making a new home in Ventura, a mid-size city along the Pacific coast about fifty miles north of Los Angeles. This means that the ocean is something we don’t just perceive as a getaway or a holiday destination. It’s something we see nearly every single day.
And once you’re a local, especially a photographer local, you see things that go far beyond the gorgeous sunsets and the lapping waves, including several things you wish you could un-see.
This dessicated pelt, a lunch opportunity for shorebirds and scavengers along the Hollywood Beach, was once a young sea lion. Its bones now picked clean down to the very contours of its skull, it is, sadly, also a more frequent sight for those of us walking the area coastline. Hundreds of sea lions have been washed ashore to suffer and die this year along the California coast, poisoned by an invisible scourge happening silently out to sea. A compound called demoic acid, a species of plankton, is in a state of high surge at present. That is to say that chemical changes which typically convert very small amounts of it to a deadly neurotoxin are currently churning it out like crazy. Fish eat the algae that contains it, apparently without harm to themselves, but sea lions eat the contaminated fish, and the result is an epidemic of sea lion death in San Luis Obismo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and other coastal towns.
The process by which these toxins are produced in bulk is called upwelling, which occurs when the right combination of colder water meets the right amount of nutrients. Upwelling seasons are a part of oceanic life, occurring randomly since the beginning of time. But what’s puzzling to science, and deadly for mammals like the sea lion, is the increased frequency and intensity of such toxic “blooms”, which may very well prove to be yet another sinister side effect of climate change.
California has so much of its life anchored to the seasons and cycles of the sea that such threats are front and center for policy and abatement, meaning that the state is already seeing things the rest of us have not seen, making match-point decisions that will eventually echo across the great middle of the nation. But to know a thing is happening, we first need to see it happening. Cameras are great for vacations. But we are also obligated, now and going forward, to also use them to bear witness, if not to head off destruction for ourselves, then to chronicle, for our wiser children, what fools their forebears once were.
STAX OF WAX
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO HAVE STRADDLED THE LINE BETWEEN DIGITAL AND ANALOG, doing most of their daily duty as dedicated pixel peepers but occasionally dipping their toe back into film, should certainly sympathize with those who, in recent years, have reverted to the comfort of dropping a needle onto a vinyl record, even if they themselves haven’t invested in a new turntable or a disc-washing device. Heading back to the happy land where experiences were a little more tactile can, indeed, be a lovely little side trip into comfort. For me, however, as a music lover who has long since divested himself of the bulk and maintenance of tangible tune storage, it’s not so much the worship of vinyl that interests me: it’s the places where the vinyl worshippers go.
Salzer’s Records, est. 1966, Ventura, CA
One of the most welcome side benefits of the rebirth of records is a surge in dedicated record stores, not the measly music departments niched into Sears or Targets but places designed just to sell vinyl, and lots of it, along with bongs, t-shirts, and other headgear. The Sam Goodys and Licorice Pizzas and Peaches of the world may be long gone, but a new crop of repurposed shop spaces in re-gentrified neighborhoods is springing up in their place, alongside the few hardy survivors from the First Great Golden Age of Wax, such as San Francisco’s amazing Amoeba Records, Minneapolis’ Electric Fetus, and, as seen here Ventura, California’s Salzer’s Records, originally opened in 1966 and still so huge that, even using a fisheye lens, it’s impossible to show its entire two-story interior in a single shot.
Upon entering, you can smell the patchouli oil and incense, returning you either to your hippie roots or your favorite fantasy of what that era might have been like, depending on your age. Most remarkable from a photographic point of view is that the elder LP shops still exude the same energy as when we were all tender little flower children: the idea of music as but one component in a total immersion into creative energy, a tribal coming together of sounds, smells and sensations. Admittedly, it’s hard to capture all that in a camera, but, like blindly pulling out a random album from your library and slapping it on the turntable, you just drop the needle, and see what happens.
Far out, man….
YES, CHEF!
By MICHAEL PERKINS
Photographers are often instinctual artists, like the cooks in your family who have never cracked a cookbook in their lives but who know, deep in their gut, that, in their hands, a pinch of this or a dash of that results in culinary perfection. They perform without a net with a mastery that seems magical. Other photographers are like chefs, building recipes through exacting amounts, precise steps, and critical timings. Both kinds of shooters “cook” their way to miracles with their own individual approach to the kitchen, and both create amazing delicacies.
When I am in my “chef” mode, I love to play with the many “recipes” touted online by various photographers, endless customized lists of pre-sets that can be dialed into your camera’s brain ahead of the shutter snap, many stored in modes that can be summoned with a click of the function wheel, allowing the shooter to change his/her mind in an instant, as well as giving him/her a whole series of comparative variants on a scene in a way which was, well, impossible in the pre-digital world.
The ergonomics of my camera allow me to dial up as many as five different customized modes (beyond built-ins like, say, Aperture Priority) without taking my eye away from the EVF, guaranteeing me almost the same exact composition across multiple shots, each taken with their own exposure, metering and white balance ingredients. This gives me true choice in a real-time environment, which is perhaps the greatest luxury in shooting with today’s cameras.
The top image seen here of an architecturally stark pizza joint in Ventura, California is the product of a faux-Kodachrome recipe stored on my Nikon Z5’s “U2” mode, while the second shot is a decent re-creation of the old Kodak Tri-X monochrome film (tweaked to simulate the use of a red filter) and shot with a recipe I had stored on “U1”. Both shots have their points, and whether the image works better in color or mono is a battle for another day, but the point is that, with today’s gear, no one has to calculate these looks from scratch while they’re trying to shoot. Nor do they have to wonder whether a scene would look better with a certain look. They can just dial it up, do it, compare, judge, and shoot again, all while the light is right and the subject is still there in front of you. Somewhere my 12-year-old self, armed with a $5 plastic box camera equipped with one shutter speed and a single aperture, is popping champagne corks.
thenormaleye 