By MICHAEL PERKINS

MANY LARGE CITIES BOAST ENORMOUS STRETCHES OF ULTRA-TALL GLASS AND STEEL TOWERS arranged in a kind of urban forest that is both broad and long. Think Manhattan, where the dense bigness of the skyline seems to stretch outward to all points of the compass at once, a town of big shoulders where all the short shoulders seem to have been crowded out, and where the amazingly new seems to nearly eclipse the old.

That idea of a solid, omni-directional bigness is not as universally true on the opposite coast, where, in many parts of Los Angeles, for example, the town’s bigness is often confined to buildings right along the main drags, with shorter, older residential neighborhoods intact, almost invisible, just a few blocks either side of that, as if the skyline went dramatically from dominoes to sugar cubes within a very brief distance. This is quite pronounced in the “museum row” or “miracle mile” section of Wilshire Boulevard, which begins in Santa Monica near the coast and makes its way northeast to the heart of downtown L.A.

Hidden from view in the busier parts of Wilshire, and yet scarcely a hundred yards north or south of it, dozens of older districts can be found, boasting huge homes that, in some cases, date clear back to the 1920’s, largely unchanged by all the monstrous stacks of stories that line the main avenue. They are not part of the “concrete canyon”, but are indeed “canyon adjacent”. In this frame, a vintage house can stand in stark contrast to the skyward reach of its taller neighbor, almost as if the skyscrapers provide a buffer or protective wall that acts as a barrier against the encroachment of time. The average height of a structure can thus drop from dozens of floors to two, or even one, within the space of a city block.

Neighborhoods are delicate things, and it’s always a delight to see how well some of them manage to defy change, or, more precisely, to survive it, living on to assert their own identity. Los Angeles is not unique in its array of canyon-adjacent jewels, but it is one of my favorite photographic hunting grounds because of the phenomenon.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

AS MORE AND MORE PHOTOGRAPHERS DIP THEIR TOE into full-frame sensors for the first time, a slight re-learning curve seems inevitable. The smaller sensors that were typical on the first DSLRs taught us all to do a strange math when sizing up shots, since a cropped image was smaller by one-and-a-half times or even more than those taken on a traditional 35mm frame. This meant that some lenses shot tighter on our cameras, with, for example, a 35mm delivering a frame more like a 50 in terms of the area covered. In moving to full-frame, the process is reversed, with a 35 shooting just as wide as a 35 should, forcing us to re-think how much info we want in wide shots that suddenly seem like wiiiiide shots.

Glad as I am to have a lot more breathing room in my images, I am still being reminded that, on a really wide shot, I seem now to be very far from the center of action. Shooting mostly with primes rather than zooms, I have to take several trial shots until I hit the right balance, and, in many cases, move a lot closer to my subject. I’ve got to get further into in.

This shot of a freight train rolling through Ventura, California was shot on a 28mm lens on a full-frame Nikon Z5. I began sizing up the composition when the engine was quite far off, taking trial shots as it first emerged from under the trestle bridge seen at far left and just ahead of a local gate crossing. I was certain that my first shots would be just about perfect, but again and again I saw the train appear distant and small. I was still framing based on my old experience of seeing a 28 on a cropped-sensor, which would read roughly like a 42mm. In the end, I had to move nearer the crossing and stand so close to the tracks that my wife became alarmed, if the phrase “you’re going to get yourself killed!!” is any indication of her mood. Even so, the train seems like it’s still approaching me, not about to run over me.

Bottom line: my brain was/is still re-learning just how much a wide-angle can exaggerate the distances from front-to-back in a shot. I could, of course, have shot the scene with a zoom, but for the fact that the zoom I had with me was nowhere near as efficient in the rapidly fading sunset light, and that the bridge camera it was designed for had a significantly smaller sensor, which would become extremely noisy with even a modest boost in ISO. Far easier in the long run to adjust where I’d stand than fussing with all those other variables. I shot wide-open at f/2.8, kept the ISO to around 100, and snagged an acceptable shot. Wide-angles are a glorious tool, but in switching to full-frame, there is a break-in period as your brain resets on the rules of engagement.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THINGS BEGIN TO OSSIFY AS WE AGE. Bones. Veins. Memory.

Curiosity.

Over time, photographers, no less than anyone else, can see their once-fluid sense of technique solidify, then freeze utterly into stone, as approaches that began as innovation descend into mere habit or repetition. Worse, such slowing of the creative muscles can be mistaken for a “style” or a “signature look” or anything that sounds better than, say, “stagnation”.

Every stylistic innovation holds the seeds for future paralysis.

As we teach ourselves how to achieve a particular visual result, we pass, year after year, through four distinct phases in how we view our results. These phases determine how we regard the act of creation itself going forward, and they can be generally described thus:

1.  I have done it this way once before.

2.   I have usually done it this way before.

3.   I always do it this way.

4.   Obviously, that’s the only way to do it.

The first phase is tinged with a bit of amazement: hey, it worked. The second speaks of comfort, the kind of casual ease that comes with relying on something that worked once, and hey, why mess with success? The third phase sees the beginning of a slow-down, a reliance on something that will be predictably safe, and, besides, it’s now a trademark of sorts, expected of me. The fourth and final phase involves the silencing of any further discussion. The old technique in question is now “classic”, the yardstick, beyond debate. Tradition. At this point, creativity becomes nothing more than replication, ensuring more and more of the same kind of pictures, veering us away from art and into the sameness of craft.

Everyday we see articles that defend artistic paralysis as some kind of grounded science. I found the way. I know the truth. We need to turn away from stone and toward an every expanding elasticity in how we see. Otherwise we are no longer photographers, but mere on-demand printers. And for that, no one needs a camera.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHY DOESN’T NEED ANY ASSISTANCE when it comes to teaching its practitioners humility, constantly reminding the shooter that, boy, you got a lot to learn. The feedback from one’s total output, which is, let’s face it, largely composed of either near or total misses, is immediate and occasionally crushing. How can something that seems so simple be so hard to be good at? So let’s agree that the constant baseline of all picture-making enterprises is a severe whack to the ego.

To make matters worse, piled onto that baseline are any number of additional layers of failure, as the novitiate makes his/her way up the ladder to some semblance of competency. One of the toughest such layers for me is nature work, and within that, the specially punishing hell of trying to bring off bird images. Many failures in this category are due to the shortcomings of one’s gear, as it takes at least a modest outlay of funds to get the equipment needed to capture birds under a variety of constantly changing conditions. Then there is the sheer, maddening patience that is required before you can even try to take a picture of one. Beyond the fact that, on a given day, no birds of any kind may even show up or reveal themselves, you have the golden roster of excuses: weather, foliage, distance, “the sun was in my eyes”,etc., etc. The alibis are legion, at least when I am trolling for pity as regards my own blown shots.

And even if you solve both the gear challenge (the right lens, your ability to work it well) and the search for the golden moment (are you sure the nightwings are coming tonight?), there is the problem of whether you even know how to make a picture of anything in a compelling fashion. Did you just “register” the bird’s body within your frame or did you tell a small story? Showcase something of its character? Compose for effect? Some days, you drop one more desperate nickel in the cosmic slot machine and you go home with a hat full of silver dollars, as happened in the above shot, the one salvageable image from over fifty frames taken that afternoon. Will I be back? Well, sometimes one usable pelican is enough to bait the hook and keep you on the line. Other days, you lick your wounds and curse your luck. I don’t know if that’s the same as actual humility.

But it smarts just as much.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

SHAKESPEARE’S CONTENTION THAT “THERE IS NOTHING EITHER GOOD OR BAND, but thinking makes it so” seems an awful lot like the philosophy of a good street photographer.  The notion that all subject matter is but the starting line for a race toward meaning, and that creativity dictates that we all take our own paths to the finish line, rings as true today as it did in the reign of Elizabeth I. Like the bard, shooters come upon things or places whose contexts are incomplete, requiring that we tag them with “good” or “bad” stickers as we see fit. Cities and people shot at the speed of active life can yield results that are either lovely, or lonely, or both. The miracle is that, even though we are using a machine as our interpretative tool, the soul is clearly in the driver’s seat.

Public places like the diner shown here are like wipeboards of experience. Assemble a given set of things on that board, and the message is merriment, the enjoyment of a gathering. Then wipe down the board and arrange a few shadowy shapes. In an instant, the same board is a portal to introspection, isolation, sadness. This creative “optioning” goes across artistic lines. For example, songs mirror the plasticity of photography when it comes to interpreting spaces. One composer looks at a neighborhood joint and writes Roll Out The Barrel, We’ll Have A Barrel Of Fun, while another views that same hangout and pens It’s A Lonesome Old Town When You’re Not Around. Like the photographer, the songwriter sees what is and asks whether it would be better off being something else.

The burger palace seen here, built to recall the simpler times of the Happy Days era, is, in its natural state, fairly exploding with color, most of it Coca-Cola Red. It’s impossible to make the place look moody or poignant with the distraction of all that splendor, and so I did the master shot in mono, since converting a color shot didn’t render the same contrasts. In reality, the place bears the jolly name of the Busy Bee Diner, but, in my view, it works better as the Last Chance Cafe, and so there you are. Shakespeare, had he been born after about 1800, might have delighted in the camera’s ability to shape perception, much as Lord Hamlet loved to cast his Danish gloom over everything in his path. Of such things are plays and pictures made.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

DURING AN INTERVIEW EARLY ON IN HIS DIRECTORIAL CAREER, Martin Scorcese once confessed to (gasp) a crime.

Relating stories of his poor childhood to a reporter, he rhapsodized about how essential his local library was in his younger years, especially the very few volumes dedicated to cinema history in the Queens of the early 1950’s. He had his favorites, and borrowed them as frequently as he could, but the images within one special work, Deems Taylor’s  A Pictorial History of the Movies, burned their way into his mind in a such a singular way that he simply could not bear to part with them, and he succumbed to his passion by ripping out selected pages and spiriting them home. Hardly the stuff of Goodfellas, but, as a fellow book nerd, I can relate.

And, as a photographer, I am still falling madly, deeply, weirdly in love with books, and in many cases, I find it torture to prevent myself from “pulling a Scorcese” and carting the odd volume away. The elegance, the design, the permanence of books penetrates to my soul, and so it’s fortunate that I have had a camera on hand when eyeing other people’s libraries over the years; it’s kept me out of the pokey.

In the case of the collection of Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems seen here, “our” meeting was most random. Marian and I rented an AirB&B for a recent vacation stay, a lovely little casita outfitted with wonderful taste by its owner, who truly went the extra mile on decor, making the space resemble a cozy, settled household rather than a rental unit. One of the nicer touches was her use of variously sized books, the kinds sold in lots as visual props, and available from many design houses. Most were recent novels of no distinction, added merely for color and texture, and so the Browning volume was striking in that it looked not only a great deal older, but was also more intricately detailed and designed.

It was a triumph of little touches. Its title page illustration of Ms. B. was protected by a delicate tissue (still intact). Its binding was gnarled and pebbled. Its pages were  slightly browned at the corners. Its typefaces were elegant and intricate. I seriously teetered for a moment on the brink of “should I snag this?” but defaulted to a tabletop homage instead, making the old poetic word for pages, or “leaves”, into  literal bookmarks, and using a Lensbaby Velvet 56  for a soft, ethereal glow. And so, without resorting to thievery, I now owned something of the original book, and yet something uniquely mine as well. That’s what a photograph can do; it uses reality as a mere point of departure, with the ultimate destination  anyone’s guess.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IT’S A FACE THAT’S BALANCED ON A KNIFE’S EDGE, teetering between courage and despair, desperation and aspiration. And it’s a face that we, as photographers have not only seen before, but have, in a very real way, inhabited before.

The face of someone struggling to power through.

It was that utter familiarity, that universality that, for me, visually distinguished the face you see here to me, amidst a crowd of dozens of young taekwando students, all gathered for various exercises that would determine their individual readiness to advance in rank. I was actually there to photograph my wife’s grandson, but this young woman drew my attention again and again throughout the evening. At first, her face seemed merely stoic, noncommittal, maybe even blasé or bored. In fact, as I was to learn, it was a disguise of sorts, a brave mask concealing an increasingly keen state of anguish.

Thwarted not once but nearly eight times in trying to shatter a board, her movements had become slower and more unsure, as the physical toll of each attempt visibly compounded itself. I had taken random shots of almost every crack she took at the board, and she had maintained most of her protective mask for nearly all of them, but, In the frame you see here, she was clearly in a horrible space between embarrassment, agony and anger. This particular shot does not show the small glistening of tears visible in the images that follow it in sequence, and yet, in a very real way, her every feature is crying. Crying because she is uncertain if she will be able to please her instructor, her family, herself. Crying because, for this instant, she is trapped, truly trapped inside an uncertain moment that must seem to last an eternity. It is the face of all of us, at one time or another. There’s fear in it, but also resolve.

Minutes after this was taken, she did finally succeed, then slinked off into the outside hall to spend the rest of the class recovering near her family. It wasn’t a triumph; it wasn’t a failure. It was something else entirely, this powering through. I stopped as Marian and I and her grandsons prepared to leave and told her I thought she was very brave. She uttered her thanks, but her face had once again become a cipher. I hope she heard me. She had indeed managed to avoid shattering her foot, but she could not know that she had, incidentally, broken my heart.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

JUST LIKE PARENTS IN SOME FAMILIES, PHOTOGRAPHERS HAVE THEIR FAVORITE CHILDREN, those images that require no effort whatever to love. You have some of them yourself, I’m sure; the shots where everything in the concept came home perfectly, where idea and opportunity and execution locked into place like the final triumphant click of a Rubik’s Cube. And then there are, within your selfsame life portfolio, photography’s problem children , the kids not living up to their potential, “troubled” in some way. Their exposure or composition’s off. They’re rambunctious. Technically or conceptually, they won’t sit up straight and eat their vegetables.

Poor Orphaned Thingy #463, 2023. I don’t know what this is. Why ask?

As with a parent, the expected reaction of a photographer is to praise the kids/photos that got all “A’s” and lament the wayward kids/photos that underachieved. But many photogs I know actually take the opposite approach, embracing the strange, oddball images that make no sense to love, while taking the A-list stuff for granted, maybe even stifling a yawn at the sight of them. As I have stated here several times over the years, my “orphan” shots are infinitely more fascinating, and certainly more instructive to me, than my sure-bet pictures. It’s not that I don’t cheer when I get things right; it’s more like I recognize a truer, if more raw energy at work, one I realize from my first days with a camera, in the shots that I can’t explain. With some of my “whatev” images, I can’t even convey to someone else either what I was going for or why I like the result. The picture just had to be done, and just is. In that way, it’s not only a “whatev”, it’s an “inevitab”.

I fervently believe that influential photographers, even as they assemble monographs of their best work, should also anthologize their weirdest. Stuff with no commercial potential or market. Shots that cannot even be captioned, since their origin exists only within some dark little basement of the shooter’s mind. It’s important that we celebrate the raw ideas that come into our head, since they have the same basic DNA as our keepers, and will no doubt someday be components in pictures that we may eventually count among our favorite children.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

FOR STREET PHOTOGRAPHERS, ONE VERY SAD BY-PRODUCT  OF THE PAST TWENTY YEARS has been the incursion of the cell phone and its impact on the shooter’s art of chronicling life in the raw. Sifting out the potential keepers in a day’s work shooting among the public now consists largely of image after image of people turning inward, holding conversations with no visible partners, their faces frozen in the permanently bent, blank dataflow which now passes for life. It’s boring to look at, disheartening to witness, and death for pictures. The beauty of solo thought or quiet contemplation that used to be the harvesting field for street work is winking out of existence, one redundant text at a time. To photograph a person on a phone is to repeat the same dreary image of isolation over and over ad nauseam.

That’s why, in recent street shoots, I now search out groups of two or more people, just to show persons  in actual, active contact with other persons. The back-and-forth of shared experience animates the face, and the street is once again filled with humans rather than mere ambulatory receiving stations. And when I go looking for visually clear evidence of this sort, I eavesdrop on the friendship of women.

This is all my own subjective view, of course: however, to my mind, women speak to each other in emotionally layered engagement, a physical reinforcement of their connection that is starkly different from the talking that occurs between men, who, even when they are standing alongside each other, look like they’re either waiting for a bus or queueing up for a physical. There are exceptions, of course, but when I’m looking for street subjects that look like they are actually involved with each other, I look for two or more women chatting.

Generally speaking, and in ways which greatly inform candid photography, men share information, data, or analysis, while women share all that plus feelings. They move beyond mere transactional talk into vivid communication. Images reveal the underlying connections between people, all the more eloquent because they are not always intending to show them, or are unaware of the clues that they unwittingly share out despite their best efforts. The world doesn’t need even one more lonely picture of a person on a phone, but true pictures of people experiencing a genuine connection will always surprise and fascinate. And for me, there is a qualitative deepening of that connection when it’s shown on women’s faces. If you want to know the ball score, ask the guys. If you want to know the real score, ask the girls.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

VACATIONS ARE HARD WORK.

To be clear, lying poolside and trying to flag the waiter for uno mas of whatever’s in this drink is not as labor-intensive as, say, shoveling concrete. It’s just that applying mental mastery to the process of letting go can require practice, “focus”, if you like, for both man and camera. Doing nothing is actually just doing another kind of something, and figuring out what that something is shapes the kind of pictures you make while “taking it easy”. Like everything else “vacay”, I often feel like I’m just beginning to get the hang of things just when it’s time to pack up for home.

It’s not just that you shoot “looser” or more instinctively when on a trip, although that can certainly be a factor. It’s the intangibles as well. You’re not only evaluating, in the relaxed setting of a holiday, what a photo is for, you’re also making different judgements of what things are worthy of a photo. And then there are equipment issues; for example, when away, I tend to divide my work almost equally between a cel phone, on which I use a narrower, if more dramatic array of post-production remixes (see above) and my full-function mirrorless, with which I almost always shoot straight out of the camera.

In many vacation situations, the cel also acts as a kind of first-take “sketch pad” reference for ideas that I later finalize on some other device. And all of this is operating in my backbrain while my forebrain keeps nagging me to relax, damn you. But sometimes the magic breaks through. I can actually come home from time away with a small yield of pictures in which I managed to see a little differently, or somehow got out of my own way to a greater degree. In such cases I re-experience a part of the thrill I got the first time I put my eye to a viewfinder.

Now that’s relaxing.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THE SAYING “HURRY UP AND WAIT” may be most closely associated with the maddening stop/go cycle of events in the military, but it certainly also applies to anyone who serves the public for their living. This is especially true in small business. Not for nothing is the work of independent retail referred to as “waiting on” the customer, with most of the waiting spent in dead stretches until the next prospect actually walks in the door. 

For photographers, small shoppes offer unique canvasses. Unlike the designs of chain stores, in which themes and decor are standardized on a nationwide basis, the layout of locally owned stores is as personal as a signature. The choice of where and how to mount displays, stock, even mementos is as personal as it gets, making every establishment a unique statement. But the arrangement of space is only half the equation; the other half resides in the physical presence of the proprietor.

Snap a local shopkeeper and you’re exploring the face and body of the decision maker. The person who has the greatest investment in the outcome, the man or woman whose fortune is on the line. Someone who is rooted into the neighborhood, who knows who will buy and who will walk. Most importantly, his or her movement within the space tracks the technique of the shopkeeper’s most essential skill: waiting.

Images based on emotion, even the quiet, slow kind, are rich harvesting grounds for photographers. Showing the engagement of the heart and mind builds strong stories in pictures, since they are more persuasively about hopes and dreams. 

By MICHAEL PERKINS

SMALL TOWNS ARE OFTEN ROMANTICIZED as places “where time stands still”, a label which speaks more of sentiment than reality. Our desire for a return to our personal Edens, the cradles of our formation, fires the imagination with a flurry of “what ifs” and “if onlys”, creating a fond longing for the impossible little burgs where such fantasy havens reside. Photographers, like the rest of us, hunger to capture signs that there might be a realm where the insane clock of progress is at least slightly slowed. It doesn’t take a lot to sell us the illusion.

Hence the strange compact pocket of commerce seen here, found in a corner of a little pharmacy in Ojai, California, encompassing the store’s entire “toy department”. And what toys; the lowest-tech collection of kid stuff to be found this side of 1958, pastimes and playthings that seem to have rocketed from the heyday of Dennis The Menace to the microchip era by magically leap-frogging past the Nintendos and pocket screens of the ‘70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. I mean, paddle balls? Bottled bubbles? Cap guns? “Go fish” card games? Holy Cold War, Batman, where did I put my skate key?

This image completely composed itself, as framing it just a few inches in any direction would have placed the viewer back in the land of contemporary meds and nostrums, unmistakably dreamless totems of the 21st century. The result is a strange kind of border region; a perimeter of “Adult” junk, cheek by jowl with a portal to simpler days and smaller dreams, a place where you measured a kid’s value by how well Suzie could negotiate the gyrations of a jump rope or whether Bobby could make it to his “fivesies” with a set of jacks. A world in which all the grand dreams of childhood could reside in one small corner of the local drugstore, snugly stored between innocence and awe.