A few ruminations on how I conduct myself.

BY MICHAEL PERKINS

AT DISMAYINGLY RANDOM INTERVALS OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS OF THE NORMAL EYE, I’ve tried to occasionally stop to thank those of you who’ve joined our ranks since, well, since the last time I did this. I always mean to be more fastidious about observing exact anniversaries or sending out formal notes of appreciation, but, somehow, I am always me, and me isn’t very reliable in that respect. Please excuse my lack of breeding and let me say, again, how very much I value your enthusiasm, your loyalty, and your feedback. Part of these periodic notes is also, out of necessity, a re-statement of what we do, or don’t, do here.

The Normal Eye is not a tech guide. There are many, many places to find the requisite “how-to” tutorials for any kind of physical technique you’re pursuing, and I trust you to be well able to teach yourself the step-by-step mastery of how your camera works, where to buy what toy, or how to make a given image. Here, we concentrate on the things that I deem far more essential than gear…including intention, vision, and the training of your eye to do your heart’s bidding. To look outward in creating in image, you have to be able to look inward as well, to know where you fit into the world you inhabit, and to export that inner knowledge outside of yourself, into your hands and the camera they operate. Everything else in photography is mechanics, and, while you may expertly operate a machine, you are not one yourself. The picture must happen inside you before it gets anywhere near the camera.

This platform began after I had spent an entire year working solely with a 50mm prime lens, shooting everything with that single optic, regardless of subject or conditions. It was an exercise is making myself able to produce pictures no matter where I found myself, disconnecting from the idea that it was great cameras that made great pictures, and forcing myself to be a better growth medium for photographs. I loved the idea that 50mm primes were once called “normal” lenses for their close resemblance to the way humans actually see, and I began to refer to my desired destination as the development of a more natural, or “normal” way of seeing….free of biases, suppositions, bad habits, or narrow thinking.

For me, achieving a “normal” eye meant one unclouded by my own shortcomings, an eye working at peak perceptual and instinctual capacity. Thus The Normal Eye became a way for you and I to explore what it took to purify and clarify that eye, a journey, as Ansel Adams described, from taking a picture to making one, the trip from passively snapping to purposefully planning. Thanks to you, it continues to be a great trip, one based on the adventure over the destination. Thank you.

BY MICHAEL PERKINS

JUXTAPOSITION IS ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL, as well as one of the easiest, forms of photographic narrative, a key tool in the effective composition of a picture. Just placing two elements side by side within the frame creates opportunity for comparison, an analysis of the attributes of the old versus the new, the tall versus the small, the important versus the meager. The correct choice in the juxtaposing of two things can add up to an image that explores contrast and actually comments on their relationship to each other.

When the superb stands directly next to the shabby, a statement has been made. When the giant is flanked by the tiny, a judgement has been rendered. Even the mere intermingling of dark and light objects in a purely abstract way comes off as a deliberate arrangement, an intentional remark in visual terms. A thing by itself is one kind of picture. A thing in relation to another thing in a photograph can open up a far wider universe of ideas.

Often, juxtapositions are just organic discoveries of things that already exist in opposition to each other, as in the image seen here. In other cases, the comparison is more deliberately staged or interpreted in some way that has not previously been as clear to the casual observer, yet visible to the photographer’s eye. The idea is to place choice before the viewer, asking him/her to either favor or refuse one thing in reference to the other, to, in effect, rank the two ideas in order of importance. This is a key part of the engagement between photographer and audience.

When everything seems to be already shown, or decided, in a picture, it’s less engaging. However, once something has been placed in the frame that leaves something unanswered, engagement increases dramatically. A dialog of sorts has been begun with the “outcome” of the photo that’s been left in a suspended state, only to be resolved by the exchange of ideas, both by the taker and receiver of the image, as to what the whole thing is “about”. One of the first visual exercises given to children is being asked to comment on “which of these things is not like the other”. Turns out that adults respond to that mental tug-of-war as well, and that creates real opportunity for the photographer.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

ONE OF THE BEST WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS is, quite simply, to stop working against yourself. The single most frustrating thing about reviewing images that didn’t quite work is that you can so clearly identify when you, yourself, were the main obstacle to getting what you wanted. A misguided vision, an incomplete idea, the wrong technical method, or simply inflexibility or ignorance can cost you the shot, and it’s always, always horribly plain that it was you, not the light or the camera or anything external, that stamped “fail” all over certain photos.

I really had a clear, if painful, demonstration of this phenomenon last week, during a birding trip to Flagstaff, Arizona. Summers in “Flag” may bring unpredictable and sudden rainstorms and flash floods, but offer the consolation prize of one of the most amazing color explosions in the west, in its annual blankets of smaller sunflowers. Even when every bird in creation decides to sleep in late or simply play it coy, there are those sunflowers, filling every field, pasture, roadside ditch and creekbed. They are an insanely joyous gift, and it’s not so much a question of whether you’ll shoot them…it’s how well.

Perk’s Law: Don’t use a “superzoom” bridge camera for your serious landscape work. 

The image you see here is a classic example of the right intention meeting the wrong gear. The bridge camera I use to attain insane zoom access to tiny tweeters is also one of the worst lenses for landscapes of faraway scenes. The more you crank up the magnification on a superzoom, the lousier the quality becomes, as their sensors, made tiny to accommodate the space-sucking bulk of a lens that goes from 24 to 2000mm, lose a ton of light, illumination that they try to compensate for by jacking up ISO. The lenses are great in their midrange, in broad daylight, but they reek in shade and, as you can see here, are mushy when it comes to textures and finer details of faraway scenes.

The aggravating thing is that I had a regular wide-angle prime (so, no zoom capability) that is sharper than an executioner’s blade sitting in my car, not 300 yards from this field of flowers. This was somehow too “inconvenient” for me, however, and so I allowed myself to imagine that, as the adverts claim, my superzoom “could do it all”. But what did I need a zoom for in this case, anyway? Consider: I was unrestricted in my access to the area, and could easily have walked to the composition I needed, which, if I had gone out with only the wide-angle prime, I would have had no choice but to do anyway.

So, let’s call a spade a spade: I zoomed because I could, because it was handy. The quality on the wider lens, which can close down to f/16 (the superzoom tops out at only f/8, because, well, starving for light, etc.) would have rendered the flowers sharp to the horizon instead of the melted crayon look delivered by the bridge camera. As for a tighter composition, I could have achieved that later with some intelligent cropping, cutting from an inherently larger, more detailed and sharper image file. The ultimate take-home is that I knew better than to send a boy lens to do a man len’s job, and my bad choice cost me a picture.

Biting-yourself-in-the-butt dept: I’m a huge advocate of taking along as small a haul of kit as possible, always searching for ways to do more with fewer lenses, cameras and gizmos. I’m a big believer in finding a camera that will deliver 90% of what you want 90% of the time, and in leaving all the other gear back in the hotel room. But when convenience actually means a bad return on your vision for an image, you’re not shrewd or concise. You’re just lazy.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THERE ARE MANY PURISTS WHO WOULD ARGUE that Matthew Brady (1822-1896), the man that transformed photography from a tinkerer’s hobby into the world’s first mass medium, was not, strictly speaking, a photographer himself. This is a little like saying Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, was not a musician. To be clear, the nearly blind entrepreneur who first used the fledgling art of picture-making to mold public opinion and promote the archival value of images for posterity often attached his name, or his studio’s, to views actually taken by his assistants. Even at that, the modern history of photography as we know it is impossible without him. 

Brady, the closest thing there can be to a visual “biographer” for Abraham Lincoln, was certainly not the first to make portraits of famous people, but he was the most important early artist working from studio space designed primarily for portrait work. As a result, the famous and the ambitious alike flocked to his galleries in New York and Washington, eager to have their likenesses, and perhaps their fortunes, “made”. Brady and his staff were pioneers in the craft of staged sittings, featuring scenic backdrops, props, and even a different way of posing their subjects. The 1860 portrait of Lincoln taken just ahead of his historic launch at a speech at New York’s Cooper Union shows a clear, confident young politician directly engaging the camera, not staring off to the side, as was the custom in many other portraits of the time. But, even as Brady introduced artistic touches to his work, he was no dainty dilettante : he saw in photography a tremendous business opportunity, and worked constantly to expand its effect and reach. And the first thing he did to attach more fame to his Manhattan studio was to leave it. 

The artist as subject: a studio portrait of photographic pioneer Matthew Brady, taken in the 1860’s.

Brady’s famous quote about his urge to take his enterprise to the new battlefields of the Civil War (“I had to go; a sprit in my feet said, ‘go’, and I went”) may sound like a description of a grand adventure, but it was, essentially, a way to grow the market for his product. In sending fully equipped shooting and processing wagons to the front, he was, wittingly or not, inventing the demand for documentary photography, for a newly pictorial kind of war journalism. He and his teams became the first in the world to provide blanket coverage of an active cataclysm, an approach so stunningly novel that it created a global sensation when he mounted the first exhibition of the results, “The Dead Of Antietam” back at his home gallery in New York.

More of interest to the millions of amateur photographers that would come a generation later, Brady moved the science of the art forward in ways that would eventually improve the ease and efficiency of the process of picture-making for the average shooter. In addition, in freeing the camera from the studio, he lit a rocket under the way advertisements, newspaper articles and books were marketed. Steel engravings and pencil drawings of major events in local gazettes soon gave way to photographic inserts in even small papers, and a fundamental change in how politicians, goods and ideas were “sold” to the public. And then there is the legacy of his amazing portrait work. Absent a million tiny nuances about Lincoln the complete man that are now lost to us, even in the mountain of print that survives on him, generation after generation continues to feel it “knows” him through the mosaic of  images snatched out of time by Brady and others. In unleashing the camera’s complete potential, he can be rightfully called the godfather of all modern media, the creator of the grammar by which we visually engage the world around us.  

By MICHAEL PERKINS

SOME CITIES ARE 24-HOUR HABITATS, and so provide a constant crop of photographic opportunities. New York certainly is not the only burg that “never sleeps”: it’s merely the one whose nightly pulses are as legendary as its daylight rhythms. Other places, drained of workaday bodies by nearby suburban sprawl, empty out to the bare bones after 5pm, spending fully half of every calendar day as ghost towns. I love being immersed in the unique flavor of a big city’s “second shift”, where darkness dictates a completely different set of rules for visual engagement. It’s more than just headlamps and neon signs: it can also be a strange kind of sleep mode where daytime spaces, underused at night, become redefined in ways both visible and mysterious.

The inside of this building, a fairly featureless slab in midtown Los Angeles, can’t really be examined in daylight, when it’s filled with worker bees. Contrast from the outside sunlight can make this glass grid imperviously blank from 9 to 5, and only at night can its inner cubicles and their interior glows be seen more clearly. Looking into these windows, however, is a reveal without a revelation. We merely see light patterns, a checkerboard mosaic of active and dormant work spaces. We look in even as we look “across” at reflections of the neighboring building from which I’m shooting. It’s intriguing simply as an abstract pattern, but there is no true narrative, such as might be observed by photographing, say, busy workers crowding the streets below at midday. Photographs of such night scenes aren’t really about anything, they just are.

However, the fascination for me is the viewpoint, which can only be observed at night, at a controlled distance, and, in the case of this image, in the even more artificial reality of a fifteen-second long exposure. In photographing under such conditions, I somehow feel like I’m stealing something, a something that’s invisible in the city that most people know and use during the day. It’s calming and exhilarating at the same time. I’m getting a privileged view into….what? Does it matter? Why did I bother coming here?

And when can I come back again?