PLANE GEOGRAPHY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
Three Worlds, M.C. Escher, 1955
LOOKING THROUGH MY FAVORITE IMAGES, either hand or camera-created, I have always been drawn to those that ride a tightrope between discovery and mystery, balancing delicately between what is revealed and what is concealed. For me, viewing a composition, whether in a painting, drawing or photograph, I am, of course, intrigued by what the artist chose to include in the frame, but I am just as fascinated by the decisions that were made as to what to leave out of it. By choosing something, the framer is un-choosing every other possible choice. That very deliberate action, to me, is the essence of picture-making.
I once heard a boorish person described as someone who could add something to a room just by leaving it. I probably have been that person several dozen times without knowing it. But in visual art, subtractions can often function as additions of a sort. The act of creating a photograph, as I myself practice it, is the presentation of certain information that also implies information that I’ve withheld. Three Worlds, the M.C. Escher illustration show above, is a perfect example of how these artistic choices can spur curiosity. Here, in the single plane of the water surface, both the life of the forest above and that of the pond below are suggested, and yet the three “worlds” remain more suggested than displayed. We never have the complete reality of either the forest or the pond spelled out in full. In fact, there is more detail provided in the leaves floating on the water than in the selective depiction of the other two realities. The leaves act as a portal between two other disparate states that will forever remain largely unexplained. The result is tantalizing, a tease for the mind that results in deeper speculation. The viewer’s mind is fully engaged.
Skywalkers, Michael Perkins, 2026
In the other image, the very under-explained aspect of the reflective surface is designed to ask more questions than it answers. The viewer is free to speculate, to wonder, to try to decipher what, actually, he is looking at. Most importantly, no final answer needs be rendered, just as no explanatory caption is required. The image simply is, whether or not the individual attaches anything extra to it. The wall between reveal and conceal is inviolate, and should be. Any discussion is legitimate, as is no discussion at all. Pictures can be “about” things, or they merely be about themselves. Riding that tightrope between “is it?” and “it is” is a big part of the fun.
GOING HOME FULL
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I KNOW SEVERAL PHOTOGRAPHERS who evaluate a shooting day the way they might evaluate a round of golf, as if they had to total up a score of some kind to measure either success or failure. Their internal grading systems declare a given outing to be a bust, a win, a waste of time, or a revelation, with many bemoaning those occasions on which they “go home empty”, which, I guess, means they either “found nothing to shoot” (an idiotic notion IMHO) or “didn’t get any good shots”(another concept I have a problem with, since all photography is instructional and thus cannot be wasted time unless you waste it yourself) The idea of putting a day’s shooting into some arbitrary “pass or fail” column strikes me, to say the least, as missing the effing point.
Taken on a birdwalk in which the birding was marginal but the walking was divine.
When I began birding, I found I had to re-think what the object of a photo shoot was. I first went into it the way a fisherman might judge the day’s catch, that is, by how many trout were in the creel when I headed home. In such a mind set, any day I did not “bag” the correct(?) number of bird images was a bad day. It was as if I had been assigned by some cosmic editor to bring back a certain amount of “product” and had failed the assignment. Thing is, watching birds isn’t about what the rest of the world wants or demands. It’s about mindfulness, about being fully present in the moment. In terms of photographs, it’s the only way you will be able to even approach snapping subjects that are generally elusive and non-cooperative. Only paying full attention to what’s in front of you will mentally prepare you to make a visual comment on it, which is what happens when you choose to photograph, well, anything.
The other thing that anchors me in the moment is being just as mindful of my immediate surroundings beyond the birds. Not all walks are birdwalks, but all birdwalks are walks, each with its own features and compositional possibilities. Some of my favorite landscape images were the byproduct of days when days on which The Birds Aren’t Happening, or when I was far less adept than my companions at spotting this or that species and naturally began to look for something else to train my gaze on. Happily, I now can head back after a day when no usable bird pictures resulted, yet still not feel as if I “went home empty”. Empty is a manifestation of the mind. It’s just one of many mental program switches that you can toggle on or off. Photographs don’t just happen when everything’s perfect, or else no one would ever shoot anything. Run what you brung, shoot what comes along. It’s the attitudinal equivalent of A Bird In The Hand.
SAME CANVAS, FRESH STROKES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
DUCK INSIDE ANY GIFT SHOP IN A BEACH TOWN and you are immediately awash in paintings, shirts, mugs, posters and assorted other bric-a-brac of the area’s most familiar tourist attraction, captured and immortalized in any and every medium. Want a potholder that will remind you of your great time in Lake WhattaLoada every time you take a sheet of cookies out of the oven? Right over there, sir. Lotsa sale items, too.
What such displays demonstrate is just how closely we all tend to agree on “what’s to see around here”, as well as just how tough it is to bring anything fresh or new to the 5,000,000th view of the gorgeous local waterfall, the awesome local ruins, the vibrant local boardwalk, etc., etc. Strangely, this can mean that, say, the Eiffel Tower may be among the hardest things on earth to photograph, because everything, but I mean everything, has already been said about it. Every visitor “destination” presents a similar challenge, as you become just the latest schnook to try to snap that town’s Great Historic Whatsis.
In Ventura, California, the G.H.W. is the local pier, which, in one form or another, has stretched into the Pacific just opposite the downtown since it was opened in 1872 as a transportation hub and commercial wharf used to bring merchandise and lumber to the area and to export the area’s agricultural products and crude oil. These days it is used for fishing and as a pedestrian walkway with views of Ventura and the Channel Islands, which stretch North and South about an hour’s sail from shore. Over the years, Mother Nature has spanked, split and splintered her dozens of times, and time and time again, the city fathers/mothers choke up the cash to patch her up for the tourists and locals. It is impossible to imagine Ventura (original town name San Buenaventura, given that every third locality here is named after a saint) without the thing.
And so, now that I myself am a local, it photographically haunts me, or rather dares me to find something, anything fresh to do with it as a subject. I attack it from every angle or aspect, and always seem to snap into the same track as all the other human satellites orbiting around it. And, as I say, the shops in town are like a kaleidoscopic gallery of all the various attempts made by folks like me. We’ll never actually master it. But taking our shot is beyond irresistible, like trying to swim against the tide. The canvas doesn’t change; the only real difference is which brushstroke we choose…….
HONEY, I (SHOULDA) SHRUNK THE CAMERA BAG
By MICHAEL PERKINS
TWO YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, I changed residence for the first time in a quarter century. The actual implementation time for the relocation was in short supply, as the last weeks before the vans rolled were jammed with weighty decisions. Given that Marian and I were moving to an apartment half the size of our house, tough calls had to be made. I jettisoned thousands of CDs, hundreds of books, a Goodwill store full of outdated apparel and a crap-ton of assorted junque.
However…
I brought every single lens with me.
No tearful goodbyes for the various speciality glass and one-trick optical ponies I’d accumulated over the past twenty-five. And it’s not that certain gadgets here and there shouldn’t have gone to their glory. I just lacked the guts to push the button, and so a short life-time of gear and gimmicks made the journey with us, even as my ongoing evolution in technique had, in recent years, seen me taking pocketfuls, not bags, of kit on my shoots. To put it simply, most of the time, I use fewer and fewer lenses to do more and more. Many days, I go out only with whatever’s mounted on the camera. And, looking around, I am not the only aging shooter who’s come to that decision.
Closest thing I have to a single “go-to”, a manual Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 from 1977.
That said, I never really saw myself as a one-lens-for-everything kinda guy, and so it was amazingly easy to sell me on the wondrous properties of the next lens I’d buy. Surely that next hunka glass was going to address whatever shortcomings there were in my style and vision. And yet, I could be spare when I wanted to. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t make fewer lenses do more. After all, The Normal Eye was borne out of my exclusive use of a 50mm, or “normal” prime lens for an entire year, not to win a bet or a dare, but because my work needed re-grounding, a re-set after too many years of pictures that were little more than family candids. Keeping the emphasis on my own mindfulness rather than on tools accomplished that. Regardless, my interest in other, more specialized optics grew over time, even though I would actually use many of them only on occasion, and hardly enough to justify lugging them all around with me on trips “just in case’. Oscar Wilde, on his deathbed, reputedly remarked, “either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” Similarly, either my work was going to grow, or the goodie bags needed to haul an increasingly unwieldy arsenal of glass were. So it’s time for a little tough love.
I’ve spent the two years since the move going through the lens trove, attaching each of them in turn to bodies, and taking each out for a run to see if they really still justify their continued status as dust collectors. I already know that I am going to continue to run leaner in terms of what actually gets packed up to accompany me on shoots. My last trip anywhere saw me leaving the house with two, count them, two lenses total. That, for me, is crash diet. The question is whether I can actually divest myself of the extra junk or continue to haul it out for occasional sessions of polishing and dreaming. I keep hearing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s exhortation to “simplify, simplify” and contemplating just how much camera I actually need to get a given job done.
It’s a process.
LET’S BE TOGETHER, ALONE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHERS NATURALLY SEEK PUBLIC SPACES, looking for the individual stories that travel through great halls, museums, places of worship, centers of commerce. If you want to observe the ants, your must seek out the anthills. Certainly, we are also drawn to quiet venues that are less densely populated, but to get a sense of interaction, of human-on-human transactions and encounters, vast, crowded places have a definite narrative appeal.
But grand spaces, at least for me, can act counterintuitively if the crowds in them on a given day are too sparse. That is, they work counter-intuitively. Big areas that are only partially filled, or even nearly empty, can strike me as lonelier than a single solo stroller on a rural road. It’s the contrast, visually and emotionally, between designs that were made to accommodate thousands and the empty feeling created when only a few dozen are on hand to fill those huge cavities. In images, it can be made to suggest a very intense isolation created when an individual is patrolling areas intended for huge throngs. The scale of things changes the terms.
A single seeker in a big woods looks like an idyllic communion with nature, whereas a solo wanderer in a huge man-made space suggests loneliness. I can’t explain it; I only know that, pictures-wise, the setting shifts the effect from Guy Getting Away From It All to Last Man On Earth. Context in photography isn’t everything, any more than any other single element. But it is a lot when it comes to showing the difference between “alone” and “lonely”. Some of this goes to the biases of the individual photographer, of course, and that’s why there is more than one of us trying to do this job. Still, I am always surprised when a single factor in the making of an image goes from important to crucial. Space, and how it gets filled or not filled, is one of the most decisive of those factors. We show what we see and we see what we feel.
CONTEMPLATING THE FLICKER
By MICHAEL PERKINS
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
I AM NOT THE TYPE TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO TRAIN THE MICROSCOPE on the details of my private life. In my view, there are some things to be shared, and some things to be held in reserve. I know that, in the age of full viral disclosure, such a sentiment is counter-intuitive, maybe even quaint. Can’t help it. I go through a lot of things as a human, and some of them are simply not for public consumption.
All of which is to say that, as I write this, I am sailing through some tricky emotional waters. Neither the cause nor the cure is the point, really, so, again, most of what I’m feeling will be of an inner-dialogue nature only. It’s enough to say that certain mileposts make you more mindful of the fleeting quality of existence, especially as the years advance. And for me, as a photographer, I also wonder if I’ve made anything of lasting value, or at least narrative clarity, as I contemplate the many clicks I’ve accumulated over a lifetime.
That sends me rifling through past work, looking for something that looks how I’m feeling. Sometimes it’s an easy search; other times it’s a slog. What you see here matches my sentiments of the moment, although, when shot, it was merely my way to salute what, for me, was a particularly poignant work of art. Somehow, right now, today, this moment, it’s hitting me in a distinctly different way. Photographs can do that. You snap off a frame for one purpose and find that, over time, the damned thing has grown a whole separate set of arms and legs beyond anything you could envision at the moment of its creation. Some might call that art, although, to me, it’s more like alchemy. Magic.
Anyway, here’s hoping that your most powerful inner feelings occasionally find themselves conducting through your finger to a shutter button, and, from there, to something more lasting. As long as we continue, so does the search.
THE SLOW FADE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IT USED TO BE SAID OF CERTAIN RAMSHACKLE STRUCTURES that, if the termites inside it ever stopped holding hands, they would disintegrate.
Over the years, roaming with a camera through every kind of borough, village, burg and town, I’ve often wondered what force inside them was still “holding hands” strongly enough to keep them from collapsing or merely blowing away. Photographers, for reasons rooted in too many years of bias and cliche, are naturally drawn to decay, to the impending end of stuff. Not only do we seek out those things that are just about to vanish, but we feel a near moral obligation to document them, ofttimes spending more time capturing the twilights of buildings than we do their grand openings. And so it goes.
Sunbury, Ohio, about twenty miles northeast of Columbus, is a town that has taken its good old time vanishing beneath the waves. It is a master class in the fine art of the slow fade. As far back as I can recall, it has always been in the process of, if you will, going out of business. Its central square comprises nearly the entire town (village?), its businesses in a content state of near vacancy. There are thousands of such towns all across the midwest, places where, at some time, it seemed a good idea to nail two boards together and start some kind of enterprise, driven by jobs, nature, religion, or just an urge to get good and goddamn far away from wherever it was you started. Who knows why we head out for parts unknown, or how we know, yes, this is a good place to stop wandering.
In such places, the storefronts that promise Good Eats, Cafe, Breakfast, or Dine-In-Or-Take-Out act as these towns’ few solid pillars, as if the attractive force of their various Tuesday Lunch Specials is enough to keep the entire encampment from vanishing in the next strong wind. I am drawn to whatever effort is put forth at such joints to dress things up, to liven the display window, hang a little color from the porch, hand-letter the street signs. Now that this picture is about a year old, I almost wish I had walked inside the world of the Sunbury Grille on that day and checked out that was on offer. I’m always careful, however, when snapping images of these places, as if I’m obviously branding myself as an Outsider, someone who is Not From Around Here. Traveling through small-town America is like riding an an uncertain wave that may crest on a high of hospitality or founder on a beach of Otherness. All I can tell, in clicking off a frame or two, is that something in this place is still keeping the lights on, still holding hands.
Ex Machina
By MICHAEL PERKINS
A quick primer on making a camera exposure in the early 19th-century:
- Lens cap off.
2. Lens cap back on.
3. Repeat.
4. Pray.
The photo-tinkerer Thomas Sutton may not have been the first to improve upon this stone-age method of allowing light onto media, but his early mechanical shutters, introduced in the 1860’s, were refined and imitated endlessly across the photographic community, becoming the first essential tool for the control of exposure rates. From that era to this, every camera made anywhere in the world has had some variant on the Sutton shutter as the principal gatekeeper for light. It is the most essential of features, and, as the last purely mechanical component in the picture-making process, is on a kind of extinction watch. It won’t happen quickly, but it’s en route.
Most major manufacturers have, for some time, included in their designs the option for a purely digital shutter, with the mechanical shutter as a default, meaning that you must opt in for the digital. Traditional shutters have “curtains” ahead of the film or sensor, and are opened and closed in micro-seconds. Digital systems are not true “shutters” at all, as there are no physical curtains per se, merely an electronic signal sent to portions of the sensor to be more or less light-sensitive in different parts of the frame as dictated by the exposure chosen by the shooter.
Already, as has been the case when other mechanical camera systems have neared their respective sell-by dates, people are choosing up sides as to which choice is better. Those who favor mechanicals will talk of superior flash syncing, great performance with artificial lighting sources, and more than 150 years of refinement and improvement. Digital shutter fans will point to their much faster speed ranges, reduced vibration and noise, and, most crucially, the lack of material wear-and-tear. Both systems have their boasts and dings, meaning that, for the moment ( A.C.E. 2026 at this writing) both will have their armies of frothing fans, delaying the decision by manufacturers to dump mechanical for good in the name of cost-cutting, customer input, or both.
Many of us, er, revered elders (translation: old coots) have lived long enough to see one mechanical function after another obviated in the modern era, just as the complex systems of analog processing were supplanted (not replaced outright) by digital imaging. One man’s modern miracle is another’s sacrilege, and so the shutter wars will take a while to shake out. Eventually, we find ourselves asking just was a camera is, with the only logical answer being the eternal one: that which facilitates the making of an image.
RANDOM SHOTS FROM A BULLET TRAIN
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MANY OF MY PHOTOGRAPHER FRIENDS NOW SHARE STORIES WITH ME, not about the great shots they bagged or the selling points of this or that bit of kit, but of the physical costs of staying in the game. Now, of course, I should mention that most of these friends are also, like myself, getting pretty long in the tooth, and that the rigors of making images have become more pronounced with every new day. Cameras, no matter how compact or streamlined, still have to be lugged from one place to another, and since the shooting experience is crammed with variables, from topography to weather to one’s own mortal carapace, said lugging can exact a toll as time progresses. Many of my birding friends, for example, frequently suffer a muscular crunch known as “birder’s neck”, induced by too many skyward searches for titmice and flycatchers. Others get it in the shoulders because the only lens for a certain job is also the most likely to louse up one’s upper arm. And so forth.
Cambria, California, September 6, 2025, 180mm, f/6.3, ISO 100, 1/640 sec.
It’s impossible to age without eventually fixating on how much the process seems to be speeding up, or, in photographic terms, how many shots we’re likely to be around to take. We are, suddenly, one backache, one misplaced step, or one out-of-warranty ailment from obsolescence, inducing the feeling that even our most considered frames are random shots from a bullet train. It’s as if dusk is approaching and we’re trying to squeeze in just one more somersault on the summer lawn before our dad calls us home. It thus becomes tricky to remain calm, to remind ourselves that, even were we to top the century mark, we could never see or shoot it all. We have to learn to be okay with limits. Because, simply, we have no choice.
And so we learn how to choose….our place, our time, our approach, our moments of abandon, our rhythm of patience. We become photo editors of the soul, posing the everlasting questions, what can be done? With these conditions? With this stretch of time? With how I feel right now? This is not despair, merely a recognition of the tools and time we have. It’s really the same calculation that all photographers have always had to make, except that time (or its imminent disappearance) has now rendered the choice more urgent. I keep hearing Adam West’s Batman rousing his partner to the chase with “QUICKLY, ROBIN! THERE’S NOT A MOMENT TO LOSE!” in that stentorian call to arms that was his melodramatic specialty. And so it is with the making of pictures. There is still time to play, along with more carefully adjusted and efficient ways to do it. The bullet train races on, but not everything out the window need be a blur.
THE JOYS OF RE-ASSIGNMENT
All Roads Lead To, 2025
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S UBIQUITOUS AND EXHAUSTING USE OF THE TERM “ABSTRACT”, especially in artistic circles, took a word which should have been as precise as a scalpel and hammered it flatter than a cow chip. Anything in a painting, a photograph, a piece of music or a work of literature that didn’t adhere readily to easy definition or analysis was bumper- stickered with the word, as if that alone settled the argument. Lazy beings that we are, we can’t relegate an unknown thing to a handy drawer or convenient category fast enough, and so, Picasso was “abstract”, Joyce’s Ulysses was “abstract”. If I had boysenberries on my corn flakes instead of bananas, I was now eating an “abstract” breakfast.
I myself don’t use the word often, at least as an adjective, but I do appreciate its use, in photography and the other arts, as a verb. To abstract something means, then, to take something out…out of its original context or use. All objects that we see in life are more or less assigned to be seen/used in context with something else. A wheelbarrow looks “correct” when it’s standing next to a hoe or a shovel or a barn. A piece of fruit looks “right” when arranged with other fruit in a bowl. Taking those objects and abstracting them, then, frees them from how we’re accustomed to seeing them, and forces us to assign all-new values to them, something that truly frees the interpretive artist. Now the thing is exclusively what we say it is. Exciting.
The fruit bowl in our previous paragraph is worth further examination. 20th-century art movements took explosive aim at the classic still life, deliberately tearing it loose from the several centuries of examples of its place in visual art. The results could be disorienting, but these revisualizations in both painting and photography led us to revere design and composition as absolutes, and to recognize in objects only the values we personally gave them, blasting away our habitual conceptions of them. A seashell became a dissertation of geometric design. A nude became, in some artists’ hands, another kind of seashell. And so on. There are many questions that rattle around inside a photographer’s brain both before and after the shutter click. What am I looking at? What am I supposed to see? What do I want to say about it? Do I leave it undisturbed or try some mischief with it? What do I want others to see? As in everything else in visual art, you get the best answers when you pose the best questions. Cameras are already abstracting the world, extracting a part or an aspect of it to create an impression. It’s really just about how far you push that process.
BUY THE DREAM. FORGET THE PACKAGE.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I BREAK OUT IN HIVES every time I see ads for cameras that claim they can “make you excited to shoot again”, which is really one of the more transparent pitches designed to make you believe that gear is an end unto itself. Specifically, our gear, which, more than their gear, will actually bring you fulfillment and mastery in a way nothing else can. Those hives turn into itchy, bleeding boils when the ads explain that it’s your bulky, uninspiring, cold, and impersonal camera that’s holding back your art, and that our warm and cozy, tactile clutch of knurled knobs and analog-ish switches will remind you of the joy you once had in making pictures, but lost…..until we came along.
Now, I would never be stupid enough to suggest that sleeker, simpler, more romantically designed cameras can’t re-ignite one’s fever for photography. Sexy stuff sells, and has frequently been sold to me. However, when your creartive flame starts to flicker, it’s vital to seek the real reason that things have gone cold. Is it really about products, or about process? Can you only bring back your original ardor for shooting just by re-tooling its mechanics? You’d never ask whether a new Maserati would make you a safer driver, nor would the Maserati people sell you their product based on technical reliability. Far from it: that sporty little monster is selling you a feeling, a sensation, some intangible lightning-in-a-bottle that will, magically transform even the experience of driving to 7-11 for a loaf of bread. For the very same “if you only had this” approach in photographic terms, see the copy in the vintage Leica ad shown above.
Gear purchases are supposed to be practical, in that we seek the perfect tool for what we want to create. However, said tool, no matter how many warm and fuzzy contours and menus it offers, can only take us so far in the pursuit of excellence. The oldest questions asked by photographers, i.e., “how will it help me do what I want to do?”, “is it enough camera?”, “is it too much camera?” or “am I really as likely to use it as to admire it?” must still be asked and answered. Manufacturers are selling a dream inside a package. Investigate and buy the dream, certainly, but realize that the package is, after all, just the box the thing came in.
COMMENCING THE UN-ESTRANGEMENT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
Earth Day, 2026
THE FIRST RUSTLINGS OF THE AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALIST MOVEMENT, which, by the end of the 1960’s, had peaked with the first Earth Day, served as a kind of eco-kindergarten for many who had never been properly informed about the growing estrangement between humans and the planet they inhabit. In simpler terms, we simply had never known how little we knew: we had no automatic mental link between our causes and the world’s effects. We weren’t stupid; we were ignorant. And, for a time, that newly-imported knowledge translated directly into action. Cleanups. Laws. Modifications of our basic behaviors. And, incredibly, the feeling that our governments had entered into a kind of partnership with us on the planet’s behalf.
What a difference fifty-five years can make.
As a photographer, as well as a plain old human being, I can certainly attest that many of the pro-earth crusades we undertook in 1970 have borne fruit. We have trained ourselves to a certain higher level of mindfulness. We have demanded, in some cases, that those we vote into office make themselves accountable to the health of the planet. And several generations of photographers have exhaustively and dutifully documented those changes.
And yet, in some cases, we are worse off than in the days when even Richard Nixon championed the formation of the EPA. Our current government is not only non-supportive of progressive remedies for climate change; they have deliberately worked to thwart protective measures designed to forestall absolute atmospheric Armageddon. Science is sniffed at and disdained; solid evidence of the world’s impending eco-collapse is regarded as hoaxes or fairy tales, while regulation that would protect us from billionaire despoilers is shredded, with short-term profit as the only alibi.
Photographers have a duty, no less than print journalists, to counter lies with visual fact; to say the uncomfortable, to show that the woods are on fire; to remind us that, unlike 1970, we no longer even have the excuse of ignorance to justify our inaction. Just as poverty relief, health initiatives and peace crusades have variously been “sold” via images in ages past, the welfare of the planet must become The Urgent Message Of The Age, and now. Pictures like the one up top, which I was privileged to make of the central California coastline last year, must not become mere souvenirs of a happier time. We must not only fight, but constantly remind ourselves of what we’re fighting for. Like Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and our other great national poets, we must be prophets for our own time. We must visually measure the distance between us and nature, the better to help close that gap. Let the great un-estrangement commence.
ONE CLICK AWAY FROM NIRVANA
By MICHAEL PERKINS
Stop me if you’ve heard this one:
A little girl is taken to a house with many rooms. As she starts to walk through, she notices that, in the absence of any furniture, each and every room is filled from top to bottom with manure. The farther she goes into the house, the happier she seems, until she is actually skipping and giggling with delight. Asked by an adult why she is so happy, she says, “with all of this” (indicating the mounds of manure), “THERE MUST BE A PONY NEARBY!!!”
I like to think that that little girl grew up to be a photographer.
One person’s mess is another person’s opportunity, and in evaluating the world, creative types have to err on the side of hope. The world can be a hideous grab-bag of nonsense and chaos, but all of that disarray can prove merely a thin upper layer, with treasure just beneath it. Photographers, like writers, painters, and sculptors, take the world on its own terms, determined to “find the pony” in all the manure. That abiding faith is what leads shooters to maintain the belief that our next image at least has the potential to be our best. How else to maintain the excitement, the anticipation which creatives need to keep turning the page? If what we see in front of us is, indeed, all there is to see, how can we even get out of bed in the morning? No, better to even have our hope dashed from time to time than to go into battle without that very precious armor. This particular shot may not have “clicked”, but we are still only one click away from Nirvana.
Like anyone, I often fear that “there’s nothing to shoot”, or, more terrifyingly, that I’ve already done my best work, and am on an inevitable decline. Both statements are illusions. I still shoot far too much manure to suit myself, but, if I keep a shovel/camera at the ready, there is always the chance that a pony is nearby.
THE TOUGHEST CAMERA ADJUSTMENT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING THINGS about studying the lives of photographers who are blessed with longevity is tracking the evolutionary changes within their styles. Edward Steichen is an amazing example. In his ninety-plus years, he was, alternatively, a photorealist, an impressionist, a stellar portrait artist, an amazing industrial photographer, a student of macro images with flowers, a curator, a printmaker, and an essential influence on fashion work. At each stage of his life, as he struggled to master himself, he also adopted, mastered and moved onward through the photographic discoveries and movements of an entire century. His was no mere technical adaptability, however, but a coordinated effort between self-discovery and its application to his art. You cannot creatively have one without the other.
We contend with many forces in life, with the ones between the ears being the most indicative of what art we will create.
I have often told my friends, as I myself slide further into antiquity, that the greatest gift you can receive as a human being is, simply, to get wise to yourself. You must be able to catalog and identify your every limit, possibility, failing and talent, and time’s impact on all of that, to make anything of value. If you stagnate, your art will follow suit. Getting to this promontory of self-knowledge is no easy feat, as you must abandon the convenient moral habit of seeing your every failing as someone/something else’s fault, and of giving yourself sole credit for your every success. It’s beyond cliche to refer to yourself as a “work in progress”, but it is simply the signal trait of a successful life. You can’t grow as a photographer, or a potter, or a golfer, or a fry cook without steadily increasing self-awareness, and that is won only by very hard, consistent effort.
There is a reason why all of the great philosophers share some version of the admonition “know thyself”. Shakespeare famously said that if you are true to yourself, you cannot be false to anyone else. Phrase the same sentiment in the more hackneyed language of a pop song, and you get “I gotta be me”. Same message, your translation may vary. Photographs are more than mere recordings. That what seismographs are for. Creating a picture means that you start at the back of the camera (actually behind it) with an idea, then press that concept forward through the machinery like a vintner pressing a grape until the ideal marriage of willful mind and obedient machine produces something that reflects the value of both. Adjustments within the camera are mostly practice and craft. Adjustments behind the camera measure something far more precious.
STATEMENT / SUGGESTION
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY CAN BE INCREDIBLY DIRECT as a means of conveying visual information. The terms of certain images are bare, even stark, with subtlety sacrificed in the service of immediacy. Some of the greatest pictures ever made tell their stories in very clear and simple terms. Nothing, for example, can surpass the power of the grainy immediacy of the photos taken of the explosion of the Hindenburg. Smack. Wham. No detours, all force, everything arriving in the now.
The choice between black-and-white and color in pictures is often a choice between that sharp, sudden newsfoto impact and a slower, more layered appeal to the senses. Scenic titles, at least over the last one hundred years, have seemed to cry out for a wide array of hues versus rendering the same subjects in variant tones of the same single color, or monochrome, and so color has become the default choice for several generations of shooters, with mono reserved for special effects or moods. We have developed an innate sense that, for certain “beautiful” things, shooting in a narrow range of tones is somehow “less than”…less than real, less than splendorous, less than lovely.
But do we have to automatically accept this proposition? Can monochrome images convey their own unique idea of beauty, equal to or even superior to color-splashed tableaux? Having been raised on mono from my first days with a camera (mostly an economic choice, given that color, while certainly popular, was pricey), I learned to work within what I then regarded as a constrictive box of narrow options, imaging how much better this or that would look in color. Now that color is the general default, I almost feel as if I must prove that a given shot would work better without it…that is, I have to have some kind of “note from teacher” to justify mono’s use, as if, of course, you need to shoot this in color, unless you’ve made the case to do otherwise.
Strange.
Photographers are often needlessly neurotic, of course, and so most of our “problems” are of our own making, but that’s the creative process for ya. I long ago formed the habit of clicking between pre-loaded recipes of settings, shooting multiple versions of more and more subjects, especially the ones that are “supposed” to be in color. Snapping off an additional exposure in mono costs me nothing and often affords me the chance to….what else..?….have yet another unresolvable argument with myself.
I really must seek therapy some day……..
(SHIFTING) POINTS OF PRIDE
by MICHAEL PERKINS
IT’S HELPFUL, OCCASIONALLY, TO CAST MY MIND BACK SOME FOURTEEN YEARS to the very first days of this blog. The initial motivation for starting The Normal Eye was to at least try to create a photograph platform different from those I was finding online at the time. It seemed that the dominant energy of most articles in those days involved product reviews and technical how-to’s, which I wanted to avoid, both because I felt that that “market”was already being saturated, and because I felt under-qualified to preach or pronounce on much of it. By way of contrast, trying to chronicle my own challenges and growth as a photographer felt easy and at least honest, and the idea of using TNE to emphasize motivations rather than mechanics felt like my most authentic path.
Since then, I’ve been gratified to also make connection with other shooters’ personal quests and alternate truths. They’ve kept me curious, grounded and humbled. Reluctant to act as little more than a student, I’ve inherited hundreds of teachers. It’s been a great arrangement.
This all came slamming back into my mind a few days ago, when I stumbled on this self-portrait from 2012, the year we launched The Normal Eye. After dealing with the initial shock of how much more hair I once had, as well as how much less I apparently weighed in those days, I was grateful that I had framed the shot wide enough to preserve at least a sample of my first “photo wall”, which consisted…what else?…of the work that I was proudest of at the time. In noting that not one of these images hangs on a wall where I currently live, I was reminded of just how and where (and why) I had made all of them. They were exercises in technique as well as hardware, making it easy to peg such-and-such a picture as having been taken “three cameras ago” or “before I really learned to do whatever I was going for there”.
The shots shown here, then, are a chronicle, a diary, reflecting my first extended work with prime lenses, montages, macro work, HDR processing, and a deliberate move away from flash and toward available light, but they are also a timeline, reflective of what I held to be important at the time, thoughts that made their way directly into TNE posts. In the most perfect way possible, my journey was the blog and the blog was my journey: the two streams of inquiry flowed back and forth into each other. I still believe that there are other voices far more qualified than my own to discuss hardware and tech, but I remain confident that I can still trust my instincts as a photographer, and that I can convey them into words that might at least encourage, if not teach. And for that, I am grateful.
SEND FOR OUR FREE CATALOG
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IN “VOICES OF OLD PEOPLE”, THE POIGNANT SOUND MONTAGE of eldercare patients assembled by a young Art Garfunkel for the 1968 Bookends album, one sentimental senior, unable to find an old snapshot, remarks that he would give “without regret, one hundred dollars for that picture”, a sentence that is saturated with a longing that can no longer be satisfied. That one utterance imprinted on my sixteen-year-old self, forever establishing the value of both the photographs left behind, but, even more, the ghostly essence of the images lost to time. Now, as I have reached (and probably surpassed) the age of the old man in that montage, I find that photographs are, more than ever, a kind of testimony for me, as well as a trail of bread crumbs for my children, who may be even more keenly aware than I that time is running short, and that certain information must be mustered.
That may be why, as Marian and I took on the daunting task, two years ago, of disposing of over half our earthly possessions in order to downsize to a more manageable space, we very deliberately photo-catalogued many items that were too troublesome to carry forward, but which still might have the power to spark fond memory, for us and especially our kids. We were caught up in the newly popular practice of Swedish Death Cleaning, the discipline involved in just leaving less stuff behind for others to sort through and clean up once one leaves the stage. These pictures of various trophies and keepsakes were not rushed, like random snapshots, but done in as close to studio conditions as our very short timeline permitted. After all, they have to capture the elusive essences that made us hoard the objects for long. They are storage batteries for a very personal energy.
The diorama that Marian’s daughter made of her dream dance studio back in grade school (top) and my fond farewell to my enormous “kit bag” of electronic connectors and adapters (above) shared the same fate, i.e, the “discard” pile, but not before they posed for their respective close-ups. They shared “studio” space with wall art, old book friends, Art Deco teapots, shirt-pocket radios and a swarm of other life markers. It’s amused us to consider that, having gotten rid of one kind of junk pile, i.e., the actual physical souvies of a lifetime, that we merely swapped it for an electronic cache that will also have to be decoded by our loved ones, if they are so inclined. Hard to know if that’s really progress, but……
At the end of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends song cycle, as two friends, both advanced in age (“how terribly strange to be seventy..”), share a park bench, they again underscore the value of a physical memento of their shared adventures:
long ago, it must be……I have a photograph…….preserve your memories…..they’re all that’s left you……..
SIZE (STILL) ISN’T EVERYTHING
In photography, as in so many other things, one man’s luxury is another man’s bulky nuisance….
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY IS AT LEAST PARTIALLY ABOUT barriers to good picture-making, and how they were overcome. This means that, when a solution to a longstanding problem is introduced, let’s say a technical or ease-of-use breakthrough, the new way of doing things is celebrated by someone saying that the old ways are now “dead”. Digital imaging? Oh, it’s the death of film. Better sensors? Well, that’s the death of lo-fi images. And cellphone cameras? Well, that’s obviously curtains for the compact camera.
On that last one….
Camera phones were an amazing bend in the road, redefining the traditional appeal of point-and-shoot with even more size convenience and eliminating the need for a separate, dedicated camera. The impact of cels was so huge that, initially, it even allowed us to overlook just how technically primitive the first generations of them were. The shock wave was most measurable in the shipment figures for compact cameras, which were nearly cut in half between 2010 and 2020, when the decline began to slow, and then partially reverse. An entirely new class of compacts, smaller in size but more expensive than their predecessors, began to lure customers back by boasting more fine-tuned control than point-and-shoots of previous years and specs and performance that rivaled DSLRs and even full-frame models. The tide was further turned by two simple words: Tik. Tok.
Again, the actual user universe makes the final decision on what photographic format or system is “alive” or “dead”, with Tik-Tok’s immense social media platform beginning new dialogues on whether cels or new compacts produced better pictures, along with a comparison on the experience in shooting this way or that. Shooters could go on TT and see side-by-side views of pictures of the same subjects taken with cels or one of the new compact superstars like, say, the Canon PowerShot G7 X and post their impressions. Will the pricey, sexy new compacts spell the “death” of iPhone photography? Not bloody likely, no more than the highly touted rise of cels spelled “death” for older compacts.
There will always be mega-millions who opt for a cel’s ease of use, which, paired with its rapidly advancing technical prowess, spells convenience that a separate camera often can’t deliver. But at least we can agree that greeting a new development in the art of photography doesn’t automatically render everything that went before it obsolete. No craft rooted in creativity can afford to be that close-minded, and we’ve seen far too many cases in which, in our very individual pursuit of pictures, we declare everything old to be new again.
FOR WHICH IT STANDS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY, SINCE IT TRAFFICS IN FROZEN MOMENTS OF TIME, is, of necessity, in the business of symbols.
We have scant, stolen instants in which to try to simplify complicated ideas, to improvise a visual shorthand for concepts that the philosophers fill bookshelves explaining, or attempting to. And symbols are the key instruments in that shorthand, as we mean for this to stand for this, or for that to imply that, and so on. The tricky thing about symbols, however, is that they convey different things to different people. They are fluid, mutable. Personal.
So who owns the symbols of unity? Of freedom? Of defiance? Dedication? Memory? Pride?
Patriotism?
As America counts down the final weeks to the 250th anniversary of its founding, we can easily forget that flags, decals, banners or badges are not pure in their power, nor are they universal in their meaning. There are too many of us that have lived too many different kinds of lives for any one set of symbols to say the same things to all of us. And so, in an era of almost unparalleled division, it’s only natural that we disagree also over who “owns” this things. If I wear the Stars and Stripes on the seat of my jeans, am I celebrating my freedom to do so, or disrespecting the rigid ritual of Old Glory aloft on a flagpole? History is layered, and symbols can be tweaked, exploited, or shanghaied to serve the programs of many people with many aims. Photographs of the various ways we decide to celebrate something like a flag can explore nearly infinite interpretations, and therefore the visual subject cannot be exhausted. Every depiction of a widely-used symbol merely underscores how non-common, how very personal it is.
Maybe the best way to show respect for a symbol is to acknowledge all the ways it has been used; as tribute, as memorial, as rallying cry, as bludgeon, as emblem of hope, or badge of error. To photograph people who are “rallying round” a flag, or any other talisman, is to document all these uses and imply many more. Pictures thus become more than mere documents, but evolve instead into a kind of testimony.
GENTLEMEN, START YOUR LENSES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
NEW CAMERA START-UP PACKAGES IN THE YEAR OF OUR FORD 2026 are marketed in almost the opposite way they were a generation ago. Back in the days of Ronald Reagan, manufacturers that had been accustomed to selling permanently attached lenses to their bodies suddenly saw an explosion in SLR sales, and with it, the demand for detachable glass in various focal lengths. Thus came the idea of the “kit” lens, which, for quite a while, tended to be of a single focal length. Indeed, lots of us elders’ first “grown-up” cameras came with a 50mm or 35mm prime. Back then, this made more sense than equipping bodies with lenses of variable focal lengths, since zooms of the period were bulkier, slower and more expensive. Primes were more compact and reliable.
Fast forward to the current market, and you see the complete reversal of this thinking. Selling a kit lens with a variable focal length, say, a 24-70 or 18-55, is now thought to afford new photographers more versatility, an easier break-in period for a wider range of techniques. This has been made possible by vast technical improvements that allow zooms to be smaller and far more responsive than was the case forty years ago, including greater ranges for maximum aperture. There is also the consideration of price, as a variable optic allows the user to save money on the purchase of separate specialized (limited?) optics. As a consequence, new cameras today are almost never packaged with a prime as its kit.
These days, both a prime and a zoom can make this shot, but the prime is still faster and sharper by far.
This where we inject the Joni Mitchell line about “something’s lost, but something’s gained”, since, in photography, new choices often obliterate old choices. Fact is, there is still an argument to be made for primes as a learning tool for newbies, if for no other reason than that, since they contain fewer glass elements than zooms, less light is diffracted on its way to the sensor, which greatly affects sharpness. Primes’ performance at lower light is also still leaps and bounds beyond that of zooms. And, of course, even primes can be “zoomed” to a degree (an old technique we call “walking”), which actually promotes more compositional mindfulness than just hitting the “tele” toggle.
My point is that, still, today, some photographers might be more than glad to learn on a prime, if it were on offer. I would therefore love to see manufacturers offer two basic kit packages when introducing a new camera, one with a zoom and one with a prime. Neither option should obviate the other for the consumer. This is merely reflective of the fact that there can never be just one way to gain experience, and that no options are strong enough to be universal decrees. I can really only speak to what works for me, and yet I strongly support more choices for more platforms. Camera tech needs to be as inclusive as possible so that photography can fully thrive.
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