By MICHAEL PERKINS

YEARS AGO, “SUCCESS” FOR THE WORLD’S FIRST SUPERBRANDS IN PHOTOGRAPHY was defined by how well a company could induce people who had never shot pictures to try it, and then do so again and again. Camera companies around the turn of the 20th century realized that the process of making a photo was dense and daunting, and so they designed the risk out of it with the first “box” cameras, turning millions into consumers of not only the cameras but, more importantly, the film they needed to feed them with. The message in their advertising: we’ve made it easy. Have no fear.

More than a century later, it’s even easier, one might almost say insanely easy, to take a picture. But I want to argue that, in the face of all this convenience, we might have just a little fear. A tad.

Even a technically bad picture like this may have the seeds of a good picture within it. But that does not make it a “keeper”.

Historically, the word fear meant a healthy respect for something. The phrase fear of the Lord was not intended to enshrine terror as a virtue, but was promoting humility, a recognition of a higher authority. A little healthy “fear” is nearly mandatory when climbing a mountain, or in daring to launch yourself into the cosmos. In the case of photography, tech has nearly guaranteed that we will almost always walk away with a usable, technically acceptable picture. But it can not warrant us against failure of other kinds.

We’re talking failure of vision. Of purpose. Failing to recognize that there are times when we should not shoot, or not shoot from this angle, or just shoot the way we’ve always shot. Failure to develop our eye and to coordinate it with our heart, making the camera merely the servant that carries out our plan.

The digital era has seen a mind-boggling tsunami of images produced daily around the world, and social media has seen more of those images shared out than was ever conceivable in the past. David Brinkley was being wry when he wrote a book called “Everyone Is Entitled To My Opinion”, but many of us now spill our every image into the mainstream as if everyone were entitled to every picture we’ve ever taken. This is potentially bad for our development as artists.

If every picture we make is a masterpiece, then none of them are. We have to be more aggressively self-editing because we don’t have anyone outside ourselves to carry out that task. We have to narrowly redefine what makes a photograph a keeper, or special, or extraordinary. Tech guarantees that we’ll crank something out of the box. Learning whether it’s something special is worth retaining a little fear for.

A: When is a knot hole knot a knot hole? 

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IN MY SHORT PANTS DAYS, I USED TO DRAW WEIRD STARES FROM GROWNUPS when I would point at objects and claim that I saw faces within them. Highway light poles. The fronts of radios. The headlights and grilles of cars. Often the faces were merely strange, but to my Child-Of-The-Cold-War mind, they were often malevolent. My youth was also, in addition to the being the golden age of nuclear jitters, also a high-water mark for a pop culture landscape littered with aliens and creatures of questionable intent.

All you armchair analysts may now pause to trot out your pet treatises on anxiety.

But one man’s crazed paranoia is another man’s photographic vision, and, years later, I find that the ability to see things that others cannot is less an affliction than a gift (within reason). Difference between Now and Then is that, now, I no longer care if anyone else thinks I spend too much time hanging out in the anxiety closet.

A: When it’s one half of a “galaxy being”, naturally.

The montage (visage? face? nightmare? abstraction?), seen directly above, wasn’t readily visible in the making of the original image from which it sprang, starting its life as merely a soft-focus shot of a tree’s knothole surrounded by outward radiating “wrinkles”. In fact, upon first seeing it in playback (see top image), I had no intention for the shot at all, stumbling back over it many months later, at which time it seemed to suggest the eye of an elder elephant. I started playing with the idea of making it seem like a super close-up of a wise old pachyderm, when I started asking myself what kind of symmetrical “face” might be fashioned out of doubling the knothole. There was dead space to the left of the original, so I just duplicated the shot, reversed one copy, converted it to mono, and blended the two pieces in Photomatix in the “Exposure Fusion” mode. The elephant had now become….the Elephant Man?

Actually, the more I live with this…thing, the more I realize that he very likely was coughed up from my unconscious memory of the title character in The Galaxy Being, the pilot episode of the classic Outer Limits series. He, too was all about the eyes (and not much else, since he was pure electromagnetic energy, duh). But sixty years on, an aging kid with an overactive imagination knows that monsters, and mashups, are where you find them. And, these days, with far scarier monsters to contend with in the real world, the process is less freaky and more fun.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

EVEN THOUGH A PHOTOGRAPH IS NOT A LIVING THING PER SE, it can sometimes feel as if it goes through a birth process of sorts, as if, despite our own artistic limits or lack of vision, it actively struggles to make its way into the world. Anyone who has ever pointed a camera has produced images that seem to have willed themselves into existence in spite of us. And if we possess any degree of humility or honesty, we must just stand back and let them come.

In visiting a farmer’s market on a brilliantly sunny Saturday morning several weeks ago as part of a vacation, I realized that, nearby, there was a vintage neon sign that I had wanted to shoot during several past visits to the same town. In this case, it was in front of one of the oldest Dairy Queen locations left standing from the first days of the chain, a sign which had deliberately been preserved by the locals despite the fact that the store’s other graphics were fully up to date. Now, I found myself about ten minutes away from it by car. Easy five minute stop, easy snag on my photo bucket list.

Only if didn’t work out that way.

48mm, f/6.3, ISO 100, 1/100 sec. 

An hour or so into my veggie-hunt, a sudden cloudburst converted the entire sky to blue-black and tore violently through the market, sending vendors and customers alike scrambling for shelter. Jumping, soaked, into my car, I suddenly remembered the sign, with the formal photographer inside my head saying, “the conditions aren’t really right anymore…so…” Fortunately, I decided to invest a few minutes to see for myself.

In deference to the weather, the sign, which typically would not be lit at all at midmorning, had been turned on to make a kind of pale orange beacon under the gruesome skies. The tinted windshield of my rental car plus an aperture of f/6.3 rendered the rainy scene even a few shades deeper, but, to my surprise, instead of spoiling my shot, it merely repurposed it. The gloom created a contrast between the classically cheery message of, well, ice cream, and the temporary gauntlet folks would have to run to get some. If I had gotten my way, i.e., shot the sign as I originally envisioned, the result would have been about 200% less interesting. As ooky-spooky and mystical as it sounds, the picture knew better than I did how it should look. Of course, I could go back, sometime in the future, and shoot the sign again under ideal conditions.

But, nah. Think I’m good…..

By MICHAEL PERKINS

WITH THE RECENT RUMORS LEAKING FROM NIKON, warning that the company is discontinuing forward development of the DSLR platform, comes the usual cascade of tearful tirades and grumbling, this time over the inevitable worldwide switch to mirrorless cameras and the unholy level of discombobulation and grief that accompany such seismic shifts. At this writing (July 2022), Canon has already pulled the pin on DSLR rollouts beyond their existing line of models, and Nikon has already discontinued what had been their entry-level units. Will DSLR’s vanish altogether? The blurry answer is (a) yeah, probably, and (b) not all at once. Even so, some people will be feeling the ground shift between their feet.

Immutable truth about photography: shoot pictures long enough, and the tech that you love will eventually go the way of the dodo. It will be inconvenient, confusing, and, often, expensive. Already I am feeling the pain of fellow Nikonians who are asking things like “what do I do with all my old lenses?”, which is a bump in the road for some but not the end of the road for most. The reasons for the march of the DSLR dino toward the tar pit of history are various, but the shift for many shooters isn’t about running into the loving arms of mirrorless, but turning away from any complex camera, and toward mobiles.

We all hate to be the last person trying to buy fuel for our favorite ride.

Part of what makes DSLR tech unappealing for some is the camera’s raw physical bulk, something phone shooters never have to sweat. Are you giving up a lot of fine control by using a mobile? Certainly. But if most of those extra features exist outside of your preferred shooting experience, you can easily get used to doing without them. This means that the remaining days of DSLR will be as a premium, prosumer format for True Believers. Yes, many photographers will cross to mirrorless to get the options they want in a lighter, improved format, and that, in turn, will bring the cost down on what can presently be a pricey switch, but a significant subset of DSLR users will learn to, dare I say it, settle…for phone cameras that are offering more manual settings and streamlined shortcuts with every succeeding model year.

In the words of Battlestar Galactica, this has all happened before: this will all happen again, or, if Journey is your groove, the wheel in the sky keeps on turning. Our concept of “the camera I need”, or in some cases “all the camera I need” will always be in constant flux. In the end, we will all choose our weapons, either cutting-edge or tried-and-true, face off, and keep on shooting. The rest is noise.

A bygone process, now revered as “fine art”: platinum printing, the old-school way

By MICHAEL PERKINS

TWO OPPOSING FORCES HAVE BEEN AT WORK OVER THE LIFETIME OF PHOTOGRAPHY, one backing a constant innovative streamlining that promotes more ease and greater access in the making of pictures; and the other, which works equally hard to make it more technically proprietary, more the realm of so-called “fine artists.” Camp One makes photography progressively more democratic, while Camp Two believes that it should be the exclusive domain of a select group of wizards who alone possess the magic needed to make great images.

This ever-present tug of war really came into bold relief with the dawn of digital photography. While mobiles and apps increasingly take the mystery out of the making of pictures, arcane printing processes, the persistence of film and the worship of more and more expensive, tech-heavy devices make the game more specialized, harder. One side believes that better and better pictures can be done with fewer and fewer steps. For the other side, it’s the steps themselves, from lenses to processing, that make the pictures better.

Is “faux platinum”, delivered quick and easy via software, any less authentic?

Both of the images shown here are examples of the effect of platinum printing. One (the top image) is a product of the laborious, multi-stage original process of actually using platinum in the sensitizing of media, a system that delivers gorgeous, slightly unpredictable results that vary greatly from print to print. In this method, platinum is used in place of silver based media, in a method that’s tough to master and potentially very expensive.

The other shot features one of the cheapest, fastest, easiest simulations of the platinum process, an effect achieved with the five-second swipe of a single slider on the most basic Mac photo editing platform that exists. Which one qualifies as “fine art”? Which method argues best for that distinction? Does the mechanical complexity used in one disqualify the ease of execution in the other? Is the author merely paranoid?

Just as the cutting-edge science in various NASA missions eventually manifested itself in enhancements for the average person’s life down on earth, processes in photography which were initially laborious and time-consuming become the features the masses use without fuss or even much forethought. It doesn’t mean that those of us who benefit from the pioneers are any less worthy, or that our work doesn’t deserve the title “fine art”. That determination is made by the pictures themselves, and by the dreams back of them.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

AS THE FIRST MEMBER OF HIS IMMIGRANT FAMILY TO BE BORN IN THE UNITED STATES, Robert Cornelius (1808-1893) grew up in a world in which the word photography was not yet a part of the general vocabulary. The infant art of preserving static images for posterity was, at Cornelius’ birth, still the exclusive domain of tinkerers and hobbyists, a universe away from the global obsession it would become within a few short decades. He himself did not even take a photograph on his own until he was nearly thirty years of age.

However, once he did, he became legend.

Or, rather, his face did.

Trained in chemistry, young Robert began his career apprenticed to his silversmith father, and so was well acquainted with various plating processes by 1831, when the photographer Joseph Saxton asked him to prepare the coating on a daguerreotype plate. Daguerreotypes were the medium that preceded film as the dominant technique for making pictures in the early 19th century. Silvered plates were polished to a mirror-like sheen, then treated with fumes that made the plate light-sensitive: after exposure, additional mercury vapor and a bath of various chemicals were applied to arrest the light-recording process, and the plate was dried. The plate Cornelius delivered to Saxton allowed him to record the earliest known photograph made in America up to that time, an image of a Philadelphia high school building.

Robert Cornelius, Self-Portrait, 1839

Robert caught the picture-making bug himself shortly thereafter, joining with a local chemist to perfect the daguerreotype medium, and, by 1839, posed in front of his own camera for what is commonly thought to be the first intentional portrait of a human (as well as the first self-portrait) taken outside of Europe. The slow exposure rates of daguerreotypes required Cornelius to sit motionless for up to fifteen minutes.

Cornelius briefly operated one of the first full-time portrait studios (years ahead of the New York salon of Matthew Brady) but made his fortune largely with his other inventions, including an improved system that helped replace the need for whale oil in lamps. It’s said that he actually thought little of his place in photographic history until his selfie was featured in an exhibition marking Philadelphia’s centennial in 1876 and he was celebrated by a new generation eager to chronicle an accurate timeline of the new art.

Robert Cornelius happened upon photography almost by accident, and yet, because he also modified and improved exposure times for images (along with other refinements), is a vital link in its evolution, as well as the godfather of all those billions of moody, sexy snaps we now employ so effortlessly (and endlessly) as we present ourselves to the greater world.