TWO SIGNATURES REQUIRED
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PRIOR TO THE 21st CENTURY, THE AVERAGE PHOTOGRAPHER produced his/her/their work on one platform at a time. For many whose creative energy was rooted in analog, film was the tablet on which the work was “written”. That meant that, for the most part, the look of that medium was the underlying visual “signature” of whatever was recorded on it. Go back even farther, and mediums like tintypes or daguerreotypes, with their respective looks and limits, defined what we now regard as an “old time” image. Each process conferred a certain look upon whatever the photographer captured. When you were born, the recording medium you worked in dictated, to a degree, what your pictures would look like.
A faux tintype selfie, delivered via an app. The conception and the platform work hand-in-hand.
Fast-forward to the present, in which digital technology has completely liberated the photographer, opening up a broad swath of choices for the visual signature that you choose for a given picture. Want to render your subject in a way that reflects Victorian tech? Want to deliberately limit things like light sensitivity, texture, dynamic range? Pick a period, pick a look. It’s yours at the touch of a button or the flick of an app. What a spectacular arsenal is at our command, all in an instant.
I have absolutely no practical experience in the processing of film of any kind, but then, I have no need to learn it, unless I desire to master that tech for my own hobbyist amusement. With even modest equipment, I can absolutely simulate the various emulsions of a variety of film types, replicating how they were developed by those who grew up natively with those orientations. This is like being able to write both left and right handed. My eye is one personal signature for the pictures I hope to create, and the look of a given era or medium is a second signature. My choice of platform acts as a co-signer for my choice of approach.
The greatest blessing of the current age in photography is that we have developed gear that simplifies the mechanical process of capturing a frame to such a degree that more effort can now be directed to our vision, and less on how our machinery will execute it. When you conceive of a great idea, you are affixing your signature to the result, while the platform you choose to deliver that work signs off on it as well. Amazing.
SHARING A SUNSET WITH LOUIS AND LEON
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY HAS NEVER BEEN DEFINED BY A SINGLE TECHNICAL BREAKTHROUGH. It is, of course an invention, but one which is evolutionary, unlike a “eureka” moment in which a single inventor, an Edison, say, solves a problem and generates a product. The making of pictures unfolded in a much slower fashion, with many “little edisons” adding this technique or that method along a protracted timeline. Photography is never “finished”; it is always on the way to being finished.
This means that assigning authorship to a particular development or stage in photography is difficult. The art has so many co-creators that we find it hard to nail down who was the first to do or try a particular thing. The first days of the craft saw many different people all trying to portray very basic elements of the world, with very little documentation as to who was first across a given finish line. As we find in our own time, if you think up a great idea for a picture, chances are that a zillion other people have had the same “original” notion at the same time, given how universal some of our life experiences are.
Moonstone Beach, Cambria, California, August 29, 2026, 7:40pm
By this time, for example, nearly everyone who has picked up a camera has made some kind of image of the sun. Our primal connection to nature was documented in photos almost as soon as the arrival of photos themselves. Ah, but who was the first to try such a picture? Some credit the first solar photograph to Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault, a pair of French physicists who were experimenting in 1845 with the relatively new daguerreotype method, one of the first photographic systems to boast sharp resolution and fine detail. Their exposure was amazingly fast for the time (1/60sec.) and the resulting image was small, just 4.7 inches big, but it reportedly recorded spots on the sun’s surface and so was regarded as a scientific milestone. Okay, that’s the accepted version of history. But can we really attribute “firsties” in any photographic history with any certainty? It’s been argued that several people invented the telephone at about the same time as Alexander Graham Bell, but he was just the one who got to the patent office first. The same is likely true of most advances in photography. They have so many fathers that they are community property.
Which points to the fact that almost any subject has, by now, been photographed to death, or at least beyond the point of novelty, with the only crucial ingredient one’s own approach or experience. Even then, it’s hard to approach the hyper-familiar in a fresh way. Still, it’s the degree to which we refuse to accept that “there is nothing new under the sun” that makes us, well, photographers.
INDY’S INNER SHUTTERBUG
What does your favorite adventurer use to snap snappy snaps in tombs?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE HISTORY OF THE MOVIES IS LIBERALLY SPRINKLED with images of cameras used by its heroes on-screen, whether it’s a hard-boiled detective snapping spy photos of a suspect or proud parents posing the family for key moments. Many, if not most of the cameras shown in the films are composites of design cues from various devices cobbled together by the prop department, either for visual effect or to avoid copyright infringement or both. And then there are characters that you’d figure would be armed with a camera for certain occasions, but, oddly, never are.
Like Indiana Jones, for example.
Across the span of half a century and five theatrical films, Indy has concentrated on locating all the items on his archaeological bucket list, but shooting images of his finds? Not so much. Until now. The creators of the video game Indiana Jones & The Great Circle have finally put a camera in the legendary digger’s mitts, and, unlike everything else in the game, it’s something that actually existed. A very special something, in fact, that quietly revolutionized personal photography. Meet the Argus “A”, the camera that got the world hooked on compact 35mm photography.
It’s true that many archaeological digs were documented in pictures, but most of said pictures were made on medium or large format rigs that were tripod-mounted for long exposures in dimly lit rooms. However, their sheer stationary bulk argues against their use by a guy who’s always leaping across craggy chasms or trying to outdistance giant boulders, and so the producers of Great Circle have given Jones one of the first successful compacts of the 1930’s, a dandy little number that actually outsold the main competition at Kodak. The “A”, launched in 1936, established Argus as a major player in the camera game, so much so that it sold off all its other holdings to concentrate totally on photographic products. The “A” came with a collapsible lens for a slim pocket profile, a light body of bakelite and chrome, a nifty 50mm prime lens, an aperture range from f/4.5 to f/11 and shutter speeds from 1/200th to 1/25 plus “Time” and “Bulb” settings. The viewfinder was small but serviceable, and, most importantly, the “A” accepted the new Kodak film “cassettes” for easy loading. Moreover, they delivered all this for just $12.50. The initial model reportedly sold 30,000 units in its very first year of release. More models, including one equipped with a flash shoe, would be introduced through 1941.
For Indiana Jones, a guy known to travel light, the “A” would have taken up very little real estate in even a modestly sized valise, leaving plenty of room for his signature Webley and Smith & Wesson revolvers, with which he did far more “shooting” in practical terms. It’s ironic that an iconic fictional character should finally get a camera that not only came from the real world, but, in photographic terms, changed it as well. And, in case of nuclear attack, it would fit neatly beside you as you huddled inside a refrigerator.
So there’s that.
RANDOM HARVEST
By MICHAEL PERKINS
HAVING LIVED IN BOTH FILM-AND-PIXEL-BASED UNIVERSES, I find myself leaning toward the advantages of both ways of making pictures, favoring one sensibility or the other, based on the situation. In my film days, I was trained to carefully approach my shooting based on the immutable reality of the frame count. If I purchased a 36-exposure roll, that number loomed before me like a neon road sign with every shot I framed up. With money a major determinant as to whether I could shoot at all, budgeting my shots as I went upped the ante on intentionality. Only pros whose work was underwritten either by deep-pocketed sponsors or their own flush bank accounts could snap away with complete abandon.
In the digital era, anyone can “run and gun”, that is, crank out a virtually infinite number of frames, either because they want to try various approaches or because they figure that they can select some salvageable images from the flurry of shots they take…a kind of random harvest idea, that is, “one of these must be good.” And, being human, and therefore on mental auto pilot (or just plain sloth), I have, many times, decided to just shoot a whole lotta stuff real fast without a lot of forethought, figuring either God or me will sort out a masterpiece further on down the road to Editville.
But I still occasionally go back to my old “budgeting” habits, because with that heightened feeling that “I only have so many tries as this” comes a return of the intentionality, the deliberation, and, almost always, a slowing. Slowing myself down to ask what should be Question One, or “what am I trying to actually do here?” invites planning, and planning, in the moment, is always better than editing in the aftermath. Sure, sometimes I want to shoot instinctively, as if I have a gun or a deadline to my head. Sometimes, however, I just have to go back into analog mind. What if I only had five frames to nail this shot? Or three frames? Or one? Yes, that’s it. What if I were shooting film and this was the last frame on the roll? What’s my “make or break”, Hail Mary move here?
The young lady you see here is illustrative of both analog and digital mindsets. She first got my attention walking by herself, but I could see she was approaching a group of friends, and so, if I wanted only her in the frame, I would have to shoot lots of “maybes” and shoot them fast before she caught up with them. Then, moments later, she said goodbye to the friends and was walking alone once again, over a fairly long stretch of beach, allowing me to pick my moment in just a frame or two, one of which you see here. Instinct and deliberation.
Putting yourself on notice, or arbitrarily putting obstacles in your own path, is a good way to check your thinking, to be sure whether you are, in fact, trying to create something, or whether the use of your trigger finger is merely a nervous tic. Convenience is wonderful, but not all great things come easy. Be suspicious of shortcuts and “time-savers”. You’re trying, after all, to save something far more important than just time.
SPILLING OUT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I CAN NOT PROVIDE A SATISFACTORY DEFINITION FOR THE WORD SURREAL, anymore than I could define the “reality” that it’s supposedly a departure from. It’s one of those terms that gets volleyed back and forth across the net of popular discourse, but it strikes me as more of a label for a sensation than for any definable state. And as for what constitutes surreality in a work of art, I can tell you what I feel much better than I can explain what that is. So everyone put your pencils down.
I can identify those moments in the act of picture-making that seem to call for images that go beyond the parameters of the known world, photos that require some kind of departure from reality…..and, again, don’t ask me to explain it. One of the subjects which always strikes me as a bit extra-real is myself, since I have to admit that I may never have gotten a self-portrait really “right”. It’s crazy to think that, in viewing myself in a reverse lens image or a mirror reflection, that I could gain enough distance from myself to make an objective interpretation of my own face, which is just the front layer for a mind that may or may not be in evidence, visually, on any given day. And so, in any kind of selfie, I have to trust the instinct and emotion of the moment and hope something halfway true comes out of it all.
Still.
What you see here started out merely as an exercise in “can I really do this?” and began to take on a life all its own. The initial takes were all about trying to overcome the technical mine field between imagining the idea and shooting it. The further along the process went, however, the more I found myself trying to make some kind of statement in my chosen of facial expression. For who? To say what? Is this right? Are we still just playing? Far from coming up with any answers, I’m still trying to even agree with my various selves as to what the freaking questions are. That’s any art, really, and certain a testimony to the face that photography is an art and not merely a craft. The selfie dilemma remains constant; who do I want to appear to be? And, once I answer that, how do I even go about it? Selfies are not documents, not in the way we understand one. There is always something else spilling out, making mischief, clouding the issue.
And how did you spend your Sunday?
POINTING THE CAMERA SKYWARD
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MY TENDENCY, IN PHOTOGRAPHING THE HUMAN CONDITION, is to try, if I can, to mine hope from the full range of human experience. It’s my way of manifesting the belief that there is, after nearly everything, a way forward. A path for emerging from the ashes into the sunlight. Making lemonade, if you will. That means that I normally resist making pictures that display unalloyed sadness or despair. I can’t account for why I try to see the world in that way. It’s just in my wiring.
As I write this, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy is being marked, with somber, heartbreaking images being wed to the spoken memories of one of the world’s most horrific acts of mass murder. In reviewing images I made in the first years that followed that horror, I realize that, had I wanted to, I was in New York frequently enough (my wife was born and raised there, and we maintain many ties) that I could have made some kind of photographic pilgrimage to Ground Zero to record my own impressions of the wreckage. But I didn’t. The first time I shot anything connected with 9/11 came later, with the opening of the memorial pools that had been built atop the Twin Towers’ original foundations. The first tribute. The first physical roster of the names of the lost. It was still a tremendously sad sight, even as the steel skeleton of the new World Trade Center One rose next door. But it was a symbol of resurrection. Of what The Morning After would look like.
9/11 + 10: The Memorial pools open as cranes begin the work of rebuilding the World Trade Center, Lower Manhattan, 2011.
As Bruce Springsteen sang, “Come On Up For The Rising’, and we did. We transformed a gravesite into a tribute to survival, first with the pools, then with the Oculus, the complex that re-established the PATH to its rightful role as the transit terminal for Lower Manhattan, then as the 9/11 Memorial/Museum, and finally as a new garden of towers not designed to erase memory but to, in a very special way, sanctify it. My pictures could be increasingly about those deliberate acts of resiliency, those defiant, line-in-the-sand, very New York ways of saying to Cruel Fate, is that all you got? If you want to take us down, you’ll have to come bigger than that….
As a human, I feel the same pangs of horror, sorrow and loss as everyone else walking the planet. But once I pick up a camera, I feel charged with something very different from a mere manifestation of anguish. It’s not an attempt to whitewash or deny the sadness. It’s a recognition that the only way out of the dark is to walk toward the light. Or as Ginger Rogers sang so eloquently,
Nothing’s impossible, I have found / for when my chin is on the ground/ I pick myself up/ dust myself off/ start all over again
FINAL ANSWER ( FOR NOW, ANYWAY…)
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IF YOU LIVE LONG ENOUGH, YOU’LL QUESTION DAMN NEAR EVERYTHING that you once regarded as either undeniable or settled. I am old enough to remember when many of the shoppes that offered film processing would advertise the service as “photo finishing“, as if images actually had a defined beginning, middle and end point to their lives. “A photograph is never finished”, said Ansel Adams, “only released.” Certainly, for him, a man who often reinterpreted the same negatives half a dozen times over decades, photography was a process, not a product; an organic, evolving, breathing thing rather than a set series of steps from inception to completion. That’s both the frustration and the hope involved in making pictures.
Take a serious look at your own work over the years. Consider which images, regardless of age, that you would willingly take another crack at. We’re not talking about re-doing the initial capture, unless you truly want to return to the scene of your crimes and approach a given subject from scratch, as if the version of it that you shot is essentially unsalvageable. No, we’re speaking here of a shot that was fundamentally sound, but in need of an editorial…. re-imagining. Could be a simple crop, or just the rescue of detail from darker portions of the frame. really anything that, processing-wise, you’d undertake to take a basically adequate picture and squeeze just a bit of extra precision or narrative power from it. How big a list would you come up with?
Bird Lady Rampant, 2022
Of course, you may also start with a shot that you previously believed was too flawed, too off the mark, only to find that a very small adjustment changed how it spoke (as in the case of the portrait shown here, now in its fifth rethink since being taken four years ago). Think of these images as the pictorial equivalent of a homeless guy, who after a shave, a shower, a hot meal and a decent suit turns out to be quite the Dapper Dan. The point (Ansel’s) is that a photograph will always be re-evaluated over time anyway, either through a change in social context or a shift in fashion, or people just regarding the subject matter in ever-new terms, so that we are forever adjusting how we judge a picture, whether we are thinking about doing it or not. Thus it’s not weak or silly or self-indulgent to look upon one’s creation from time period “A” and see how, in time period “B”, its power can be re-interpreted. It’s all right to release a photo, like a trained bird, then call it back at will. In fact, it’s better than all right. It’s the key to the growth of our work overall.
DO YOU TAKE THIS WOMAN……
By MICHAEL PERKINS
AS I WRITE THIS, I am marking my twentieth anniversary with my wife Marian. Over the years I have written much in these pages about her role as the central muse for my photography. I may not always have delivered on my intention to glorify her in photos, or try to convey her profound influence on how I make them, but I have had a helluva lotta fun trying.
She is, as a person who’s generally not keen on having her picture made, someone that I can seldom pose. The very things that static, formal stagings do for some others are not where her comfort zone lies, and I can only compromise the results by barking out any instruction more complicated than “look over here”. My best strategy is to get in and get out, and quickly. Candids all the way. No “say cheese” or standing her up with a travel destination as a backdrop. I have to make images of her that, before the invention of the camera, would only have existed in my own eye, rooted in our private universe of shared memories. If I can squeeze even a drop or two of that formula from my Nikon, I have more than beaten the game.
One those rare occasions when she approves of the results, usually with only a “that one’s not too bad”, I feel like Ansel, Eisenstadt and Leibovitz all rolled into one. But, to be honest, as with much of my photography, I learn a lot more from the ones that got away, the near-misses. It’s like the old joke about carving an elephant by trimming away anything that doesn’t, you know, look like an elephant. Marian is about fifteen different women to me at various times, and on any given day I can’t predict which one will show up for work. Thankfully, they are all worth pursuing, and all have their own secrets to potentially reveal themselves to a lens. I take pot luck and sometimes take home a miracle.
Like all passionate pursuits, photographing my wife is its own reward, regardless of what actually gets captured in the box. It was great fun chasing her all those years ago, and, armed with a camera, I get to take up the chase all over again, whenever I want. I cannot imagine having her as both subject and audience, just as I cannot imagine my life without her on my arm.
The other arm I’ll keep free.
You know, just in case I need to snap the shutter……
JIM MORRISON IS NOT READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP
The 1967 cover for the Doors’ album Strange Days, shot by Joel Brodsky.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
WHEN LIFE SLAMS FOUR DOORS IN YOUR FACE, open a fifth one, as a “Plan B”.
A dilemma faced the folks at Elektra Records in the fall of 1967, a year in which the entire concept of album marketing was being turned on its head. The label was issuing a strike-while-the-iron-is-hot follow-up to the debut album by the band the Doors, a record that, half a year after its release, was still atop the charts. The music for the group’s sophomore effort was strong, with advance singles already garnering national radio airplay. There was only one problem: Jim Morrison and the other members were refusing to pose for a conventional photo for the cover.
The long-time practice of designing album covers with attractive images of the artists and a few words about the content inside, a system which had been the norm just a few years prior, was suddenly out the window following the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s in summer of ’67. Suddenly, album covers were no longer just billboards; they were statements, original concepts, a bit of performance art that was, yes, done in support of the record inside, but also created to have a life of its own. The shift across music of the “counter-culture” was immediate. You didn’t just shoot a cover; you designed it.
Faced with a Doors-less Doors album cover, Elektra’s art director William Harvey decided to capitalize on the record’s title, Strange Days, by staging a tableau of bizarre street performers as living proof that, indeed, these days were strange, and getting stranger. He decided to create the cover outdoors, with veteran photographer Joel Brodsky along for the ride, at an old carriage house storage alley between East 36th Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues in Manhattan called Sniffen Court. Unable to round up enough authentic street performers, he had Brodsky’s assistant play the part of the juggler and paid a cab driver in the area five dollars to pretend to be playing the trumpet. Identical twin dwarves were hired (one for the front cover, one for the back), and a bouncer at the Friar’s Club was pressed into service as a circus strongman.
In what would be referred to by contemporary movie fans as an “Easter Egg”, Brodsky managed to sneak one of his group portraits of the Doors onto a wall as a kind of poster. In those days, he was frequently shooting with Ektachrome slide film, which may account for the blue-green color rendering, but no notes survive the shooting, so there is no way of confirming that, or of reconstructing the mix of natural and bounce light in the shot or identifying the lenses used. The shot is fairly sharp from front to back, and it looks deep, suggesting a wide-angle at maybe f/5.6 or somewhere in that ballpark, but it’s all guesswork. The image stands out a bit in Brodsky’s work, which includes dozens of the most iconic covers shot in the rock era, most of them prominently featuring a portrait of the billed artist (as in every other one of his Doors, btw). But Harvey and Brodsky’s quirky “plan B”for Strange Days turned out to be a classic on its own terms, a lemons-to-lemonade “save” for the ages.
“STREETER”-THAN-THOU
Matinee Iol, August 2026
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I KNEW THAT IF I WERE TO LIFT MY CAMERA TO MY EYE, I’d lose her.
Everyone shooting on the street has received that look, that “don’t even try to take my picture” look. You size up a subject based on some kind of instinct, i.e., “oh, this one is telling a real story“, and you get into a mad rush to frame and snap before, well, before you get caught at it. And then comes the look.
I get it. Street photography, and whether it’s reportage or invasion, is a hotbed of controversy in the present day. What a paradox. We invite cameras into our private lives more than at any other time in history, posing for more candids and selfies than can ever be calculated. And yet. And yet we reserve the right to wall ourselves off from some, not all, but some, prying eyes. Hence you see the kind of solution I was forced into here, preventing myself from being detected by going for the dreaded from-the-hip shot, the ultimate “straight out of the camera” dice roll. All sugar or all sh—-…… well, the opposite of sugar, anyway.
And then there’s the whole discussion about whether I should leave the image, which is decidedly off-kilter, just the way it was shot, or if there’s some arbitrary rule of horizon-normalizing that dictate that I “straighten it out”, a decision accompanied by much soul-searching about “authenticity” and “realness”. Who is more “streeter”? Of such things are bar debates, and, occasionally, bar fights, fashioned. Here, for your consideration, is a “corrected” version of our young subject. Does this settle it? Can anything?
Does this strike you as more normal than the original? And stand up straight, willya?
At least Ansel Adams never had to wonder if he was violating the privacy of El Capitan by taking hours to get his exposure right. No complaints from fleeting sunsets that, “hey, I want to be alone”. And so it goes. Of course photography is an invasion, a theft. Every camera is a spy camera. Stealing a potato chip from your sweetie in the movies is still stealing. The issue comes down to who else in the society sanctions the snatching, of either chips or portraits. Life, at least as much as photography, is a negotiation.
ALL ELSE IS MERELY GEAR
By MICHAEL PERKINS
Master your light before you master your camera.
Ansel Adams
CONSIDER: A BLANK PHOTOGRAPH IS NOT WHITE, like a fresh sheet of paper.
It is black, like a starless night.
Photographic images all begin the same way, with a medium that is dark because it is absent all light. Supply light in enough areas, in the correct dosage, and color and detail and narrative emerge. Light is the reagent that starts the entire photographic process, the trigger. In that spirit, how can we ever know enough about it? How can we ever become adept in all its applications? And what bit of equipment, what device, what tech tweak can compete with merely making a passionate, all-consuming study of light? Light is the only upper-case word in photography. Everything else is merely gear and word salad.
Light presents. It stages. It defines. It caresses. It symbolizes everything from inspiration to hope to, in its absence, loneliness, despair, isolation. Light wraps around things. Leads the eye. Underscores the importance of whatever it falls upon. Changes the very character of what it comments on. Speaks loudly. Whispers softly.
Seattle, Washington, August 14, 2016, 8:08pm.
Light is Topic One for photographers. Do a Google search on the words “photography quotes about light” and you’ll see a cross-section of shooters from across several centuries, all saying what Uncle Ansel said so cleanly and perfectly. Know light, and a simple camera becomes an oracle. Know light, and you control everything about what an image is saying. Know light, and the rest will come.
There is a poetic brilliance to the Biblical account of creation, as God’s first command is literally “Let There Be Light”, as if the Big Guy were saying, “Good. Now I can see what the hell I’m doing…” The very word “photography” means to write with light. To illuminate and shape that which was undefined before, to confer meaning on what was merely the abyss. That’s an amazing power. Photography is an amazing power. And to the degree that you understand what makes the magic happen, it simply dazzles the soul.
BONES ON UP
On the way to being a decent image, but some judicious use of the scissors is in order.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE ILLUSTRATOR HAL FOSTER, who authored and drew the legendary comic strip Prince Valiant, was often praised for the naturalistic appearance of his drawn figures, an effect he attributed to the practice of building them up in stages. Foster told interviewers that he began at the skeletal level for the people he was drawing, then added in layers of muscle and skin, and finally clothing to make the figures as structurally sound as possible. Photography, in which many pictures are not so much composed as re-composed, can benefit from the same “bones up” approach.
Many of the scenes we snap in the moment are fixed in post-processing, with cropping being the most common tool. We amplify what is needed to tell our visual story and shave away the surrounding distractions. So take this idea a step further, if you will, and imagine that, instead of slicing off unneeded data that “fights” our picture, we are actually beginning with a tabula rasa (blank page) and selectively building elements into it until we get just enough data to make the image effective.
Two snips later; everything I need and nothing that I don’t need.
Take our friend on the beach here. Were I visualizing this scene as if I were building it up piece by piece, I would decide that I needed three main elements; the ocean, or at least a hint of it, explaining the surfer’s purpose; his stance on the sand, which indicates contemplation or intention; and the board, which is not in use, speaking to his unresolved thought process. Do I go now? What’s my approach?
That’s it. That’s the picture. Whether I have those elements in balance at the time I snap it, or crop it back to just those factors afterward, I have visualized the photo as I want the final version of it to be. Of course, in a real-life situation, my frame has also invited other elements that are either distractive or unneeded. For instance, I don’t need more of the waves to the surfer’s left, as they tell me nothing I can’t see with a closer crop, so out it goes. Mosto of the bit of seawall at lower right also conveys nothing important, nor does the other occupant on the beach to the upper right, so, snip, they’re out. And now comes the important question; is what I have left everything I need? Is there anything else that, by being removed, will actually boost the effectiveness of the resulting photograph? If the answer is “no”, then we’re done. I’ve done a Hal Foster, building the picture from the bones up and then stopping. Finis.
All of which goes to underscore that cropping is not merely a “fix” but an active tool. You’re not just cutting things away so much as you’re requiring them to earn their place in the valuable real estate in your images. You’re not losing “the big picture”; you’re inching closer to “the right picture.”
LIMITED, AND FREE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IN TECHNICALLY PREPARING FOR A PHOTO SHOOT, I find myself, as you likely do, walking a tightwire between having enough choice and fairly drowning in options. What to carry? What might I find to shoot? Is one lens enough, and are six too many? How can I cover every possible eventuality? What if I don’t take the right kit? What if I pack too much, too little?
Not exactly a recipe for enjoyment or relaxation.
In fact, it’s like hardwiring anxiety into a creative project before you even begin it, a conundrum addressed by Barry Schwartz in his visionary book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. There is, he explains, a real juggling act for most of us between variety and fatigue, a teeter-totter of indecision which leads to frustration and anxiety. I often imagine that the author of the phrase “fear of missing out” was a photographer, a guy who, no matter what he packed in his bag, is certain that he made the wrong call. Whatever he did, he should have done something else. Misery ensues.
I have logged many miles lugging a lethal load of gear on any and all journeys, only to find that, not only could I easily have gotten by with fewer tools, but that I polluted my potential enjoyment by being paralyzed by the sheer array of choices. Instead of being liberated by all those options, I was actually impaired by them, as was my photography. I was sapping my work of any sense of joy or freedom, emphasizing what I was going to use rather than what I was going to do. It took me a long time to realize that I was sabotaging myself under the guise of being “ready for anything”. I call it the golf bag approach, in which I saw my bodies and lenses like the woods and irons in a standard golf bag. The driver can’t do what the putter and wedge can do, and so on. But a camera is not a golf club. I’ve had to get accustomed to feeling freer by being more limited. An example: the image here was taken on a day when I was out birding with a telephoto that zoomed to 600mm. Not much use for a wide-angle, or anything that delivered that look, until this fellow sped by. If I stepped back, I could open to 180mm and get the shot I needed. Not a true wide-angle, but if I could make the same effect happen without changing glass, why not, said my aching shoulders and neck?
In Paradox Of Choice, Schwartz explains the importance of choosing a course of action that is likely to deliver most of the result you want without expanding your options to such a degree that you simply can’t move. The best photography is reactive, nimble, improvisational. You can’t plan it or diagnose it the same way you can with purely mechanical operations. And, as we have all observed, it is those moments of imprecision, even loss of control, that can produce the most pleasing results. None of us started out equipped with kit bags bulging with choices; it was a learned habit, one that can be unlearned. All we have to do is trust to our own instincts to make pictures with damn near any kind of tool, to ride that tightwire between Too Much and Not Enough with more confidence.
THE PRE-APERTURE APERTURE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
SHOOTING PHOTOS THROUGH A CAR WINDOW IS A PRECISE SCIENCE, much like loading mercury with a pitchfork. And while such images are occasionally among my happiest of happy accidents, we’re not talking about a procedure I’d recommend to the timid, or the impatient. Just think for a moment about all the impediments you have to navigate just to get a decent framing from a moving vehicle in the first place: rear view and side view mirrors: visors: dashboards: wipers: grime, grit, and dust: rain: warps: reflections: unwanted shadows: “C” pillars….. I could go on, but it’s just a lot simpler to say that, as a window, a window makes a lousy window.
But let’s suppose that you sidestep all those tiger traps. How much composing space are we talking for this “pre-aperture aperture”? And at what cockeyed angle? Chance are, even before you try to navigate the various “whoops” factors and do your standard calculation for exposure and so on, you’re going to feel the car quake as it bonks over a pothole, heave forward to avoid a late-crossing cat, or compensate for a stray ray of flare. At this point, any usable picture that results will be beyond heroic and qualify as damn near miraculous. So why do we sally forth on this Quixotic quest?
High Time at Hollywood & Highland, 2026
Well, really for the same reason we attempt any kind of picture under any kind of conditions; because it might work out. We are so hungry for success that we’re also gluttons for punishment. And consider that, in some circles, the impediments from my earlier list are actually regarded by some as more real, more authentic, desirable elements of the picture. Oh, yes, I meant to frame that billboard so that the rear-view mirror obscures half of it (hey, it got Dennis Hopper a career retrospective at the Met). As usual, your motives, and what you’ll endure to achieve them, are yours alone. Me, I’m transactional about the whole window thing. Do I need the picture? Will I ever pass this way again? Have I got time to juggle everything and maybe succeed despite everything? And on the off chance that it all works out, will I appear suitably humble?
TURN YOUR HEAD TO THE LEFT, PLEASE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY IS OFTEN PRESENTED AS IF IT WERE WRITTEN SOLELY by the medium’s inventors, but the complete story is a bit more complicated; in fact, many people who never clicked a shutter in their lives had a profound effect on photography’s societal impact.
Consider, for example, the humble mug shot.
Photographs had only been around for a few years before someone hit on the idea of using them in basic criminal identification. And while no one knows for sure who was the very first person to either pose the bad guys or be forced to pose for the good guys (Belgium, Australia, the U.K. and Philadelphia are all suspects), the record is clear on the non-photographer who turned the practice into a system, one of the first criminological data bases on earth, a “rogues’ gallery” as it used to be called, that even pre-dates the universal use of fingerprinting.
Meet Alphonse Bertillon, a French police officer and biometrics researcher who pioneered a system called anthropometry, a series of body measurements designed to create a specific physical record of everyone who fell under arrest, the first law enforcement reference work to identify features, marks, scars, etc., anything unique to the individual being detained. The first reference photos of criminals began sporadically in the 1840’s, but Bertillon had standardized the practice into a strict set of procedures by 1888. It was only one of many innovations he brought to crime detection, including casting procedures for taking molds of footprints and early comparative tables on ballistics.
Bertillon developed the format that, generally, is still used to the present day: one full-on view, accompanied by a right profile, with both shots housed in the same catalog entry: a neutral or blank background to minimize confusion about head and hair contours: a standard camera and lens used for all images. The photographs were initially added to the other elements of the anthropometric system, which consisted of several baseline measurements: head length, head breadth, length of middle finger, length of the left foot, etc. Together, they took what would, in any other context, be a simple candid photograph and make it an essential tool in crime detection, redefining at the same time what photography is “for”. Images are purposed and intended differently, depending on who creates them. We who receive them assign a variety of values to what we see. Can a photograph provide evidence based solely on how we judge a human face? Do we project a sense of menace or evil purely because of how and when we were photographed? Clearly, we are in an area where there are way more questions than answers.
GODS AMONGST US
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE RECENT GLOBAL ODYSSEY PHENOMENON seems to have revived a concept that has resonated from Homer’s day to this, with amazing permanence; the so-called “Zeus’ law”, which demands that you welcome a stranger as you would your own family or friends, lest you accidentally offend a god who just happens to be walking unseen amongst we mere mortals. It’s a kind of half-arsed version of the golden rule, but the idea is solid; don’t reserve all your courtesy and respect merely for the gods that are in plain sight.
I feel that way about photography at this point in time, an age in which the long-promised democratization of the art which was forever promised has, in the infinite file-sharing universe we now inhabit, finally come to pass. We have always been taught by the obviously visible gods of our craft, the Ansel Adamses and the Walker Evanses and the Bressons, holding out only a few photographic celestials as the tuning forks to which we, as aspiring shooters, ought to resonate. But if there is any truly miraculous thing about photography in this time, it’s that the skies are actually crammed with stars, not lit merely by a few twinkling outliers. We are absolutely awash in image innovation and excellence at all times, as billions crowd onto Flickr, Insta, and beyond. The work which used to compete for the limited space of the world’s brick-and-mortar galleries is now all around us, and not just when the museums are open for business.
I am, some sixty years into this business of making pictures, still trying to streamline my approach; less gear wielded with more skill: simpler, surer ways of sensing; a removal of distractions and dead-ends to the development of my eye. It’s the work of a lifetime, and I will never complete all its most vital lessons, but I am certain that, at least, I am still capable of being surprised, which frees me from the burden of “accepted wisdom” or any lessons I have learned from the accepted list of “masters”. For now, more than ever, I am keenly aware how many, many great eyes are operating out there, how many different kinds of truth-tellers are practicing beyond the narrow Temple Of The Elite we all were taught to revere. Photography is fashioned by people who aspire to the divine, and so we can best adhere to our own “Zeus’ Law” in training our eyes on as many gods, both small and large, as we can.
LIKE THE CORNERS OF MY MIND….
By MICHAEL PERKINS
HUMANS WORSHIP MEMORY MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THEIR BELIEF SYSTEM. Fact? Never heard of it. Religion? Not even close. The preservation of our sense of “how it really was” is a stronger urge than friendship, policy, custom, you name it….a quality that makes me marvel at the very special power photography holds in our lives.
hotographs, according to what we are taught to believe, are the preservers of memory. The camera measures light and records it from whatever is in front of it. Or so we continue to assume. In fact, the static preservation of an instant in a picture can be an unwelcome challenge, an intruder into our minds, where we “don’t remember it that way” and disbelieve anything that says different. The very precision of a photo isn’t just the way we hang on to memory. It can be an inconvenient challenge to something we carry in our own internal camera. We will swear on a stack of bibles that it actually happened this way, while the camera says it was actually more like this. And that’s a conflict.
It wasn’t soon after photography was born that we turned into societies of memory hoarders, and, year later, collectors of any and every totem of our popular culture. Antiques. Replicas. Reproductions. COLLECTibles. Every town in the world has a shoppe just like the one seen here, where we celebrate, in Paul McCartney’s words, “my ever-present past”. The discarded becomes the treasured. The long-ago becomes, to our minds, a lost Eden, a bygone golden age. Even as I myself have spent my elder years doing more and more with less and less, even as I’ve winnowed out many a once-prized life souvenir, I can’t always resist snapping a shot or two at places like this, joints that celebrate our most beloved belief that we have somehow lost something precious. But how can I make a picture of something that so many of us can’t agree on the terms of? What can a mere machine know, as compared to our own hearts and minds?
For some, a cardboard Dean Martin is enough to honor a memory. In the opinion of others, I’ve wasted my time trying to make a picture out of something as personal as remembrance. I’m never sure who is winning this debate. I only know it’s out there.
AN A.I. BY ANY OTHER NAME…
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ONE OF THE HALLMARKS OF THE DISCUSSION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, as it applies to photography, is the strident insistence by some shooters that “I will NEVER use that!”, our words to that effect. This statement presumes that A.I. is some forbidden room whose spooky contents can never harm you so long as you don’t open the door to it. But, as they say on the high seas, that ship, for most of us, has sailed.
The angrier among us act as if they are sacred photo virgins who have not yet been violated, as if we can maintain our virtue indefinitely if we but avoid using this app or that process, as if we have all been asleep for the past fifty years. This is, of course, nonsense. If you have ever used Photoshop or its many stepchildren, if you have ever touched a slider inside Photos for Mac, if you have ever used a flick-of-the-finger shortcut to instantly boost color, you have already entered into some nature of covenant, partnership if you like, with products that were built on our collective human experience, imbued with the ability to mimic that experience in a quicker fashion, at our command. That is as good a working definition of A.I. as anything else I’ve heard. We pour our knowledge into a huge tub of skills and ideas, and we deputize certain processes to serve that back to us in whatever configurations we order up.
This image shows the color range and saturation rate of the classic Fuji Velvia slide film (from theleft edge to the middle of the frame) and one of the more commonly available simulations of that particular film stock (middle to the right edge) that is likely already built into the camera that you own. If it’s not, you can easily dial up a step-by-step recipe for creating that simulation as a package of custom settings via the various menus on your rig. And this is certainly not a “cutting edge” example. Film sims have been available for years, and are an immediate and cheap substitute for the costly and complex effects that only used to be achievable by lab manipulation. In fact, in the case of this particular sim, it allows the kind of adjustment that, in the analog era, was impossible with slide film, which is a final positive, not a malleable negative. What you shoot is what you get, so to speak. But, to return to my point, how is this tech NOT A.I. by a more palatable name?
The technical processes that you choose to sweeten or adjust your images are not the sole determinant of what kind of picture you wind up with, any more than your camera or media are. You are that final decision maker; you hold the tools. So what difference is there between the adjustments you currently employ and another, newer way to make adjustments? A.I. does not take your choice away from you; in fact, it offers more choices, and choices of choices, than you could ever need in a lifetime. The only thing that can make your images less “you” is your decision to let your decisions be made by someone/something else. And that’s on you.
GET TOGETHER, YOU TWO
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ONE THING CITIES ABSOLUTELY DO; they force odd friendships and strange neighbors.
I once made a small gift book for a friend based solely on juxtapositions of unlike things. Weird pairings that, in many cases, were urban in origin. It was, in a way, an examination of the very nature of cities; their cross referencing, their hybridizing, their forced homogenization of dissimilar objects and conditions to create visual alliances between disparate things. Things that would likely never be forced alongside each other outside of a city. Things that have nothing to do with each other, except, of course, in a photographic frame, their concision becoming a study in contrast.
In Sesame Street terms, one of these things is not like the other. Or, more pointedly, how did they even cross each other’s paths? And is there some special quality to a frame that takes note of their being ill-matched for each other? And, yes, it is quite, quite, quite possible, easy even, to overthink such things.
But consider: do we want to understand why two seemingly random things are visually striking purely because of their mutual unfitness? Would it explain anything? In photographing them, don’t we risk undoing the magic of their occupying the same real estate if we try to decipher how they got there? The image you see here was taken in one of the busiest districts of Manhattan. But beyond that, I know absolutely nothing of either why this picture appeals to me or what created the conditions for me to see it, other than my randomly taking this turn rather than that turn down a street. How can I caption it? How can I explain it? Moreover, why would I even try?
Photographs are extractions, not unlike the act of unearthing the fossil of an ancient beast. Outside the trained eye of the paleontologist, the object has no context, nothing that anchors it in anything else except its effect on whoever discovers it. Isn’t that miracle enough? Cities and other frames of experience throw unrelated things into relationships with each other. We chronicle those collisions as wonders. Can any additional asterisking make those moments any more special?
NOW, THE REASON I ASKED YOU ALL HERE…..
By MICHAEL PERKINS
In the end, it’s really just a box. YOU are the actual camera.
ONCE OR TWICE A YEAR, since we started this little small-town gazette almost fifteen years ago, I stop to thank you all for walking this path with us, whether you’re a new subscriber or a wizened veteran. I also use the occasions to re-state how The Normal Eye happened in the first place. It may be instructive for some, and certainly serves as a mental reset for yours truly.
Photoblogs, at the time we launched, were, and remain, dominated by product reviews and technical tips, so much so that I knew that I myself had to go a different way, that is, if I were to keep the content relevant over time or maintain my own interest in the project. As it happened, I had, at about the same time, just compiled a kind of monograph of a year’s worth of images taken with a single lens, the prime glass known familiarly as the “nifty fifty” The other word for primes being “normal”, since they captured things in much the same way that we naturally see, I decided to title the book The Normal Eye. In spending a concentrated amount of time shooting with just one optic on full manual, I learned as much about my own limits, and options, as those of the lens, with the very word normal taking on an ever-more profound meaning for me.
We come into this world sensing everything on an instinctive level. Eventually, as we grow older and are socialized and hemmed in by the basic behaviors of just getting along in the world, we learn to stray from what was our original “normal”, relying on our own instincts less and measuring “reality” in much the same way that everyone else does. We learn that, to draw the sun, you always, always use a yellow crayon. We color inside the lines. We admire others’ view of basic things, often folding theirs into our own. We learn to mistrust the purity of our own vision, in music, in writing, in what we see. We “de-normal” our eyes. And our photography begins to fall into easily categorized, generalized technique. We shoot inside the lines, with a yellow crayon.
And so, re-learning the habit of seeing everything through the natural filter of our souls requires a deliberate, and dedicated exercise. We have to re-discover our normal eye. Learning to fully see is far more important than whatever gear we choose to help us record what we see. Intentionality becomes all. And so, in this forum, I wanted to be able to chronicle, as directly and simply as possible, what I encountered, daily, on that journey back to “normal”, to the natural. We try to use TNE to act like the kind of photographic diary you yourselves might keep, marking your daily progress and your evolving attitude toward the creative act of making pictures. Because Uncle Ansel was right; they are “made”, not “taken”, and that requires an ongoing sense of self-knowledge. It’s what we strive for at The Normal Eye, and it’s what I hope you and I share.
Thanks for being here.
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September 30, 2026 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Commentary, Photoblog, Technique | Leave a comment