LISTENING TO ECHOES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I’M SURE THAT I AM FAR FROM UNIQUE in having dreams in which the departed appear; clear, real, close enough to touch.
I’m not certain why I get these visits, as they are random in nature and don’t follow any coherent narrative. All I know is: the dead are back again, and they seem to have something to impart, some issue that they are weighing in on. There seems, in these dreams of those who’ve gone ahead of us, some unfinished business, some cosmic curtain call that poses questions, teases at the prospect of answers.
Of late, for me, many of these dreams involve my late father. Let me clarify by saying that I am personally unaware of any issues between us that still remained to be settled. On the contrary, our relationship. in his final years, seemed to move very satisfactorily toward a clean finish, our chance to say everything that needed to be said.
And yet, he comes to me, and the sightings have sent me back into the last few opportunities I had to take his picture. Some of the images, like the one seen here, let his inner light and miraculous energy shine forth, making him, in the best way, immortal. Others revealed his frailty, the collapse of his outer envelope. Both messages were sad and happy and true and beyond price. On his weak days, he was a flickering candle. On his strong days, he was, as he had always been to me, a beacon.
We all lose people. That’s a universal experience, but the specific way that loss registers is infinitely personal. Grief is not a brief twinge, like the spasm that results when a doctor hits a knee with a reflex hammer. Instead, it is a long, drawn-out process, as the loved one does not vanish all at once, but in flashes. They’re gone! They’re back again! We are all haunted, but not in predictable ways; we experience, instead, a million little gratitudes and sorrows, making the photographs of our dear ones the most poignant document we will every create. We pray we get it right while these essential people are here, since our take is eventually the last echo of their lives.
THE RUBBERY-EST RULE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY WAS ORIGINALLY ALL ABOUT TECHNIQUE, a necessary mastery of basic procedural steps that had to be followed in order to get any result at all. Scientifically, at first, making a picture was all about rules.
That changed as soon as manageable, predictable systems for taking photographs became commonplace. From then until now, technique has taken a back seat to creativity. And that’s as it should be. There are no stone-engraved commandments for art. What works works. Technique is about control. Creativity is about casting it away, of arcing toward the unknown.
Of course, you’d never know it to read marketing materials, or watch tutorials, on photography. They contend that there are right ways and wrong ways to get the image you’re after. Rules. Always do this, never do that. And then there is the main mission of manufacturers, which is not to help you make better pictures, but to sell you the gear that you can be made to believe will make better pictures. The on-line reviewer Ken Rockwell, himself the source of no little controversy, takes issue with any talk of “rules”, especially the biggest bugaboo, sharpness, and the photo industry’s insistence that it truly matters:
Sales and marketing departments fuel this misconception because it scares people into buying new lenses. Sharpness is easy to test and analyze, so magazines oblige less experienced photographers with reams of colorful charts and graphs. People would make far better pictures if they spent time learning how to make great photos with what they already own instead of worrying about their tools.
Many of us instinctively know that rules like sharpness and exposure are not rigid but rubbery, that they are, at best, guidelines or reference points. The image above is illustrative of something we recognize as “reality”, and yet it’s un-anchored from any strict rule about, among other things, sharpness. Art is not codified: something is either true or untrue in the moment. Can I use this color instead of that one in painting a tree or the sky? Why or why not, and who the hell says so anyway? In our greatest moments as photographers, we regularly subvert any ideas that are supposed to be “standards” or “benchmarks”, and, the further along in our development we get, the more regularly we stray from any hard and fast regulations about just how we get to the finish line. The picture is complete, or justified, or right when we say it is. Those who were among the first haters of photography accused picture-takers of merely activating a machine, something soulless, cold, inhuman. In fact, it’s only slavish devotion to rules that can truly render a photograph mechanical or lifeless.
UP FROM THE DEPTHS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I HAVE A FILM SIMU PRESET ON MY CAMERA FOR MONOCHROME which, once clicked into, automatically comes up as extremely over-exposed for some reason. It defaults to a flood-glut of light, and it reminds me that my own default in photography is the very opposite, an inclination towards the darkness.
I don’t mean mood or subject matter or even attitude, but a bias toward images that begin almost completely black and then dial up, gradually, until they grab just enough light to get the job done. This is crucial. Where you wind up in the creation of a picture is determined by where, mentally at least, you start from.
Consider: the first photographic processes struggled to gather light. The first emulsions were inefficient, dictating extremely long exposure times to get usable results. The entire method for taking a photograph was based on patience, on waiting for the camera to register enough illumination to get to the finish line. For decades after those slow beginnings, there was a constant battle to court light, to speed its absorption, to control it. That imbued photography with a certain deliberation. Planning. Preparation. Intention.
That slower, more contemplative system still appeals to me.
May I Call You A Cab?, San Francisco, 2018
Of course it’s easier than breathing to nail an exposure nearly perfectly every time. The camera takes care of that by itself, since technology has been instructed to deliver instant rewards to the consumer. A guaranteed win. Now, not to be a troll, but what is the fun in that? Building an image from conception to completion, perhaps starting with an all-black canvas and building just enough light into it to make it work….and then stopping just at that point, refusing to go all the way to “perfection”…that, to me, is where all the reward comes in.
The image seen here doesn’t look like it does because I misjudged how much light I’d need, or because there wasn’t enough light to take a “regular” picture; it’s this way because I made a decision to minimize everything, to draw the sharpest possible contrast between foreground and background, to register most of that foreground as a silhouette. A so-called “smart” camera will not do that. I have to intervene, to risk working at cross-purposes with a device that’s been engineered to deliver an average product with no muss or fuss. Thing is, building an image up from the depths, so to speak, is exactly the muss and fuss I seek when I set about to catch light, just enough light, inside a box.
WHAT’S BEHIND DOOR NUMBER ONE?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THERE WILL BE OCEANS OF INK SPILLED OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS (metaphorically: I’m old) in commentaries on the effect of artificial intelligence on the creative process, and a whole separate wing of those results will be allocated to the opportunities and challenges specifically pertaining to photography. For one of several times over the last few centuries, we will again be trotting out some very old questions, i.e., “what is a picture, anyway?”, or “I dunno, is this art?” As regards any pairing of A.I. and human effort, however, may I humbly suggest an additional question: “Just who the hell is in charge here?”
This whole wormhole of thought has come swirling around in my skull of late as I have contemplated exactly what composition is, since I believe it is the most (excuse the expression) human of all choices in photography. The decisions on what things will make it into the frame, where they will occur in it, how they are to be balanced with each other, are all deliberate acts of judgement, a choice derived from millions of other decisions we’ve already made it life. It is a conspicuously human act. A.I. is the product, or the sum, if you like, of the world’s collective accumulation of decisions, and so can serve as a time-saving helpmeet, a technical tool that I can use to massage or mold a particular image. However, in the truest sense, it is not an image generator. Ideas flow into A.I. and are shuffled or assembled by it, but it itself derives its smarts from the genuine knowledge that it collects and remixes. It does not supply the creative spark.
Composition is a choice. Humans make choices. In comparison, the re-creation of some thing from a series of things, remixed into yet another thing, is what A.I. handily does. It is a selection from options. Humans=choices. Machines=options. This is why so many A.I. images, no matter how well-worded their request prompts or how many gazillions of possibilities are stirred into its kitchen, ring false…as not real enough, or, worse, as too real to be real (this is getting deep, so if you want to pause to slip into your waders, I’ll wait). Here’s what I’m saying, without too much excess cuteness or irony; even in a world where ever more doors offer ever more possibilities, the instincts and desires of the creative mind will always, always be Door Number One. Photographic composition is purposeful, intentional. As in the above image, there is no “reason” for how or where or why it’s shot, except the only reason that’s needed; I wanted it to be so. Relinquishing that supremely human decision-making process may be a lot of things, but it’s no longer photography.
NOT MUCH=JUST ENOUGH
By MICHAEL PERKINS
FOR ME, PHOTOGRAPHS WORK BEST, NARRATIVELY, when they don’t give away the store. Or perhaps, more precisely, the stor-Y. In my experience, images convey ideas best when they limit themselves to simple means, spare tools. Pictures that provide more information than needed to get their point across are like eating birthday cake with a birthday cake chaser; too much of a good thing. We can all be entertained by an occasional visit to places that resemble a scene from Where’s Waldo?, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
For one thing, a photo that is cluttered creates a problem for the viewer, i.e., where am I supposed to look? Or to look first? What in this grand mess is supposed to be the thing that argues best for my attention, and what, if anything, serves only as a distraction? I realize that the term minimalism has been hammered flatter than a roadside cow pie through overuse, but when you’re talking about the economy required to tell a story lean and clean, it seems to be the right word. Build your tale up in layers, like a pyramid, heading up from the foundation and adding only as many extra floors as you need to get the job done.
This image is an accidental example of what can be done when you stop just as soon as your narrative task has been accomplished. The young woman seen here was taken with an extreme telephoto as she faced a small group of kid campers. A part of one child’s face was actually captured here, with the rest being hidden by some obstacle. And yet, what real information about her role is missing? We can see that she’s positive, happy, welcoming. We can see that she’s addressing someone, and that her expression if open, full of energy. With just that much data, we can supply the rest of the story. It might have been cute to see the faces of her audience, but it’s far from crucial. The story, admittedly a chance catch, is pretty much told already.
I approach the amount of information in a shot in the same way I approach how much light I need to get the job done. Working up from total darkness, I add just enough light to make the exposure work, and, even then, I might deliberately under-expose to give the viewer a bit of a role in shared storytelling. Build up from nothing just far enough to make the picture work, and stop. Photographs are always better instruments when the taker and the received are both in on the job of determining what’s what. Giving away the story-y robs your audience of a role in determining what a picture is about.
YOU’D BE SO MUCH PRETTIER IF YOU SMILED
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ONE OF THE THINGS THAT MOST CONSISTENTLY MARKS THE EARLIEST PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAITS is the uniformly dour expressions on the subjects’ faces. People sitting to “have their picture made” in the 1800’s and early 1900’s express many things….gravity, intensity, purpose, discipline, but generally nothing that indicates any joy at undergoing the process. Much of this, we understand now, was due to the technical limits of cameras and recording media at the time, which dictated long exposure times, meaning that a flat expression was simply easier to hold than a happy one. Any technique which necessitates resting your head against a rigid rod in order to keep it stationary is not conducive to goofy grins.
But what else made early photo portraits seem so stern? I have heard that the very act of smiling in public in the 19th century was, in the minds of some, an indication that one was not serious-minded, even a bit of an idiot. And then there was the fact that, for some, the act of having a photograph made of oneself was the one and only time their life that their identity would be officially recorded. This was not a casual or everyday occurrence, then, but an occasion….not dissimilar to the portraits of great men who posed on and off for months for painters for their one shot at immortality.
Now jump forward to our time, when photography is an instantaneous thing, and the default for facial expression has gone to the other end of the scale, meaning that we don’t even have to be told to “smile for the camera”, since it’s such an ingrained, instinctual thing. Of course, we’ re delighted to be here, happy to pose for a picture. We’re actually scorned a bit when someone points out that we didn’t smile. But where is the best middle-ground for a portrait pose, given that we now have thousands of opportunities to present ourselves over a lifetime?
I have done a lot of self-portraiture in my day, and not because I particularly like the experience. On the contrary, I keep taking additional cracks at the task because I seem, always, to be getting something wrong. For one thing, in anticipating the click, I simply cannot bring off a plausible smile, as the idea of pretending that I’m giddy with joy in the moment seems stupid to me. And so I wind up with many, many frames in which I appear to be everything from mildly annoyed to moody and withdrawn to outright pissed, rather than “austere” or “serious” as I’d rather appear. It occurs to me that I seem to pose for selfies with a 19th century mindset, as if I will never be photographed again, as if I’m making a document of myself. What version of me should be authentic, most official? And why, when I labor so hard to nail candid work directed at anyone else, do I force myself to overthink the making of my own image?
At the end of the day, it’s just easier, and a lot less stressful, to head outdoors and snap a sunset. I won’t make the ultimate statement doing that, either, but it gets me off the hot seat. As the cartoonist Bruce Erik Kaplan captioned in one of his drawings, “I just don’t want to end up being me…..”
MAKING A STAND
By MICHAEL PERKINS
CALIFORNIA IS HISTORICALLY THE BUTT OF JOKES launched by the rest of America, mostly, I think, because it is a land of many firsts. Some of these innovations, from politics to entertainment and back again, are accurate forecasts of what will eventually spread like prairie grass across the continent and be absorbed into the “normal”. Others fall into the category of “fads” and merely add to the reputation of the state as “the land of fruits and nuts”. Photographically, CA’s “let’s try this” mentality adds a lot of flavor and not a little fascination. If Oregon now markets itself with the motto “keep Portland weird”, well, that’s just an unofficial franchise. We invented weird.
You’re welcome.
Cali has redefined dining for over a century, having established itself, early on, as the place where car culture met cuisine culture. We not only pioneered the “drive-in” (for both restaurants and theaters), we refined the concept further, later on, as the “drive-thru”, extending the stay-in-your-car ethos to banks, dry cleaners, and who knows, maybe confessionals. But before the drive-in, there was the walk-up, the “stand”, buildings designed almost exclusively for take-away, as the Brits call it. Take an enclosed kitchen and attach a wall of windows and a counter, and you’re in the eats business. Hot dog stands, burger stands, soft-serve stands, many of them sporting bright colors and garish architecture, like billboards with a side of food. Entire mini-libraries and reference works have been created to photographically chronicle these unique and bizarre roadside grub huts, even as many have vanished, only to rise again as food trucks.
B&J Drive-In (but mostly walk-up), Ventura, California, 2026
It’s no spoiler to restate that I adore “joints”, places where the owner is also the fry cook and his kids are working the counter. No chain or conglomerate can compare for sheer quirky individualism. I love the crazy contours, the misspelled menus, the cheesy murals, the unabashed carny out-thereness of them all. When I see signs that start with “since 19—” or “home of the original—-“, I’m already halfway sold. Drive-ins are about distancing the customer from where the magic happens. Stands say, step right up, how’s it goin’, what can I getcha. California is a magnet for new ideas, a laboratory for things that at first seem odd to the rest of the country, but soon become everyday, even invisible, in their universality. From the day in 1924 that a Pasadena joint called The Rite Spot became the first place to put a slice of cheese on a hamburger, we’re all about trying things out. What doesn’t work, we lose. What does work stays on the menu.
THE SLOW, DEEP, DEVINE CURTAIN CALL
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ALTHOUGH I HAVE MADE MANY VISITS TO NEW YORK CITY, both before and after 2011, November of that year holds a near-magical place in my heart, as that most theatrical of towns chose that particular time to stage the most glorious welcome for me of my lifetime.
The old admonition to “never meet your heroes” has never applied to my encounters with NYC, as it has always lived up to the lofty and majestic dreams of my landlocked youth in the American midwest, where I grew up in towns that boated “the” big local skyscraper instead of an entire forest of them, places where dreams had cramped parameters, limits, unlike the Apple, which had its own accent, its own vocabulary, its own Seven Wonders Of The World. As a photographer, I found that many of my visual bucket lists were composed of local Manhattan landmarks, complete with daydreams on just how I would shoot the neighborhoods and boroughs, and all their native must-sees. I visited other places, but I breathed, even prayed, in fluent, fervent New York.
And so, 2011 was something of a mission year, in that it was the first time my wife (born and bred) and myself were to visit the resurrection that was already well underway at Ground Zero, and within that, to experience the Great City for the first time in the depths of autumn. “Autumn In New York, why does it seem so inviting…?” Not only autumn, but the singular transformation in color that could only be seen at its peak in Central Park. However, in the weeks before we were to fly in, weather bulletins were alarming.
Bethesda Fountain Plaza, November 2011.
Just weeks prior to our arrival date, the city had endured a massive low pressure-generated storm called, alternatively, the 2011 “Halloween Nor’easter”, “Snowtober”, “Shocktober”, “Storm Alfred” and “Oktoberblast”, a severe system that, as it cruised up the east coast from the Carolinas, broke snowfall records in twenty cities, covering NYC in a spooky blanket of Halloween white. My heart sank; there went fall color. The trees, whipped by merciless gusts, would almost certainly be bare for our visit. Oh, well, another year…..
In the end, the snow melted before we flew in, and, by early November, the leaves in the park had held, cradling my dream site at the Bethesda Fountain Plaza in explosive hues of red, green, brown and gold. A magical framing of my fantasy location within the bounds of my favorite place on the planet. Living for twenty-five years in Arizona, this transplanted farm-belt boy had lived for many a fall season without the wondrous palette that was a birthright for most of the country. Now, the city had given me Thanksgiving and Christmas in one big, brightly wrapped bundle. That year, autumn was no sign of the end of things, or a season of sad slowing. It was divine, and for that one amazing afternoon, it belonged to me.
WE MEANT TO DO THAT (OF COURSE)
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IN 2026, BEATLES FANS THE WORLD OVER ARE CELEBRATING the 60th anniversary of the debut of the group’s seminal album Rubber Soul, a record which dramatically re-set the terms of engagement between the world’s greatest pop band and its audience. Long-playing records, prior to the mid-60’s, tended to be composed mostly of songs that were originally released as independent singles, with the priority on reaching the “youth market” placed primarily on 45’s rather than 33’s. By the second phase of their fast-evolving life as recording artists, however, the Beatles were, by ’66, moving quickly from being a “live” band that recorded to a studio to a band that was unbound by either the formal moon-june-spoon songwriting rules of I Want To Hold Your Hand or the limits imposed by what could be performed on the road. Rubber Soul, like Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds from the same year, was a document of that new-found freedom, of the studio-as-instrument, or as an album as a feature-length construct rather than a hits package.
One of photographer Robert Freeman’s original test shots for the cover of the Rubber Soul album in 1966.
Alongside the band’s expanding bag of tricks as musicians was their interest in extending that control to the actual graphics of their album covers, leading, from Rubber Soul onwards, to a mutiny against the record industry’s habit of labels assigning cover design to formal studio photographers. The Beatles truly led the charge in the idea of bands being photographed more “in the wild”, choosing their own favorite shooters and settings as well as contributing directly in the process of the shoots. The title of the album, a bit of a pun but also their way of expressing how “soul” could be elastic enough to embrace a variety of musics…..that is, “stretchable, or “rubber”, was in their mind when they first viewed possible group shots for the album cover.
The accidental distortion of the top image that inspired the Beatles to a trippier approach to the cover.
At the time, photographer Robert Freeman had a set method for helping groups get an idea of what their covers might look like at scale, projecting color slides from his shoots onto bits of white cardboard sized to resemble the dimensions of a record jacket. In showing proofs of the Rubber Soul shoot to the Fab Four, Freeman’s cardboard fell backwards a bit, distorting the image, making the band look stretched, or “rubbery”, in a rather trippy way. The group immediately asked if the finished cover could intentionally be made that way, and thus was born one of the most iconic, if accidental, images of a very psychedelic decade. Soon after, artists began to routinely lobby for their own input on album packaging, but, as in so many other ways, it was the Beatles who initially decided not only to bend the rules, but to chuck the rule book out the window altogether.
THE EASY WAY OUT. OR BACK IN.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE FIRST COMMERCIAL EXPLOSION IN CAMERA SALES that began in the late 1800’s was a triumph of design innovation, as manufacturers created devices that answered the two main barriers to the adoption of photography as a general hobby instead of a tinkerer’s plaything. Ease of operation and affordability combined to induce people to purchase their first cameras and to use them regularly. This was not an ingenious plan to sell more cameras.
It was an ingenious plan to sell more film.
The idea was simple. Make it easier and more enjoyable to take pictures and people will do it more often. Oh, and we also make film for the camera, btw. This revolution was repeated throughout the 20th century and into the first part of the 21st, as technical improvements began to warrant users against failure. As the cameras became ever simpler and the results are more predictably satisfactory, interest remained high, as did film sales.
Now, in a largely filmless world, makers have continued to anticipate more and more of the annoyances that would inhibit the taking of lots and lots of pictures, the aim being to make devices that are so intuitive that they present no obstacle whatever to quick and frequent use. But is convenience, or the guarantee of at least a usable image every time, enough for the shooter who chooses to expand his/her mastery or knowledge? Taking the cell phone as the largest and most dependable baseline of camera use worldwide, can a significant number of people be counted on to grow beyond said phones, to want devices that are a smidge more complex than the world’s most dominant point-and-shoots?
If recent statistics are to be trusted (I’m writing this toward the end of 2026), there has been a modest but definite upsurge in the sale of compact cameras, hardly a return to the sales levels they once enjoyed, but a confirmable swing away from the deep dips of the last fifteen years or so. There are several potential reasons for the rise: some consumers have expressed a longing for a stand-alone camera rather than one which is merely one more feature within their phones: others have indeed expressed an interest in something that is still small and portable but which simply “does more” than their pocket cells. Still others have been lured by nostalgia, as manufacturers are working classic visual cues into their designs, creating a longing for a simpler era. And, finally, there is the inclusion of many features which were confined to more upscale, full-function models only a few years ago. Result: compacts are staging a comeback.
Those of us who rode our pet dinosaurs to school back in the Before Times were more than accustomed to the fact that people would buy a series of cameras over a lifetime, spurred on by either a hunger to go deeper on tech or a bigger budget or both. The idea of “outgrowing” a camera was considered a basic part of one’s evolution. Now that the act of snapping a frame has been reduced to its very simplest terms, some will find that “good enough” is, well, not good enough, and find themselves shopping for the next big thrill. Convenience is still, as in the days of the one-button Kodak, a huge selling point. But, as it turns out, humans will sometimes opt for the unpredictable or risky in the name of growth.
MASTERING THE MAP
By MICHAEL PERKINS
In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.”
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
PHOTOGRAPHY WAS, IN ITS BEGINNINGS, regarded as something rather soulless, a purely mechanical means of recording things that consisted mainly of the mapping of surfaces. In one way, making a picture was agreeing on strict terms of engagement. The object in the photograph is so high, so wide, so close, so far, and has only the details you see represented here. To make an images was to map out an area as precisely, and as coldly, as a surveyor documenting a field, a kind of “what you see is all you get” arrangement. Complete. Sterile.
That viewpoint quickly yielded to the belief that photographing a thing, any thing, was an act of both giving and taking away. The activity in the image was all of what you see, but a whole lot more; everything that was in the frame was but a partial, piecemeal capture of what the eye beheld. Photographers, as well as the public that viewed their work, got used to the strange terms set by the medium, the proposition that this….this box saw something that the taker could not, and yet left the task of telling the complete truth maddeningly undone.
The human face is the greatest representation of this mystery, perhaps because we bring our own experience and memory to, if you will, flesh out any features or aspects of the person we are pursuing. We both come up short (what else is going on here?) and drown in abundance (I never saw that before!). When you aim a camera at a person, you are both unleashing mysteries and daring to withhold evidence at the same time. How can this be? How can a mechanism that is designed to help us see render us so blind? And does doing it repeatedly, that is, trying to “know” more and more faces, add to our wisdom or merely act as additional reminders of how limited is our vision?
The act of photographing a face is made even harder by the fact that none of us can ever really forget that we are being photographed; we are warned ahead of the click that the click is inevitably coming, giving us our cue to make a performance of our faces, to curate them, market them for mass consumption. Candids are possible, but they are becoming more rare, like seeing a pileated woodpecker and her young in the wild. Perhaps that’s what we use the word “capture” to describe the taking of a picture. We are running, net in hand, after something untamable. Photography is a game of tennis between reality and illusion. The volley creates a flurry of activity, but is the game ever decided?
LEAVING BAD ENOUGH ALONE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I never saw no miracle of science / that didn’t go from a blessing to a curse. Sting
Duke’s, New York City, 2018
MY FIRST STUMBLING FIRST BABY STEPS WITH A.I. haven’t focused on creating photo-ish fantasy worlds or creating with a logarithm what can’t be accomplished with a camera. If I had wanted to be a painter, I would have become one. Full disclosure: I’m not yet certain what I truly need from this portentous tool, or if I need anything at all. And so my explorations have largely been in seeing how much more efficient or precise it can be as an alternative to standard post processing, an adventure that, as you’ll discover, has yielded mixed results.
In asking A.I. to make corrections in my images, I find myself somewhat amputated. My fingers are no long pushing sliders, but rather pushing words up against each other, trying to second-guess, in written prompts, what the entity will likely deliver for me. This all comes down to a crap-ton of trial and error, and, in many cases, lots of hair-pulling and screaming “no! no! NO!” at the monitor. Thus, most of my A.I. explorations are largely repair jobs, and the mildest and simplest repair jobs possible. The grander fix I envision for an image, the harder it is to get the beast to give me what I want without adding its own two cents in the bargain. Either it, or I, need more training, and I can’t yet decide which of us that is.
The image you see up top has been the subject of an earlier post, in which I argued for the fact that even your most technically imperfect pictures might also be among your favorites; that, on average, their overall “workability” outshines whatever technical flaws they contain. The shot was taken out of the window of a slow-moving, Uber on my way back to JFK, and I had nearly zero fine control in the moment over the taking of it, hence the underexposure and motion blur. There was nothing in standard Photoshop that allowed me to satisfactorily “correct” it, and so I had finally decided that it was a better picture left undisturbed. It was only recently that I decided to envision anew what it might have looked like without the mistakes, and so I wrote a very simple prompt in ChatGPT to see what was possible. The entire prompt read, “Sharpen image by 50% an even out the contrast.”
A botched A.I. enhancement of the above shot. Things that never were, words that appear from nowhere, night into day…
That was it. No “place details in the picture that weren’t originally there” or “replace the text on the various signs with whatever the hell you like” or “transform the mood from a dusk shot to a daylight image”. In fact, however, what I got improvised in all three of those areas, all without specific instructions from me. I wasn’t trying to get rid of all the shadows; I merely wanted to modulate them a bit. I also didn’t need to place details in the picture that weren’t in the original capture. And yet here we are. And I am right back to re-loving my original, warts and all (to be fair, A.I. did not add any warts to anyone).
In “Hal’s” defense, there are shots that originally came off softer than I wanted that have benefitted from the kind of A.I. sharpening that out-performs more standard processing. But the rule that seems to be emerging, at least for me is, a little is a lot, and a lot is way too much. I don’t want my pictures to suffer merely because I’m lousy at typing in instructions. A.I. as a scalpel is fine, but A.I. as a bludgeon is disappointing and a little scary.
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.
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