ALL ELSE IS MERELY GEAR
By MICHAEL PERKINS
Master your light before you master your camera.
Ansel Adams
CONSIDER: A BLANK PHOTOGRAPH IS NOT WHITE, like a fresh sheet of paper.
It is black, like a starless night.
Photographic images all begin the same way, with a medium that is dark because it is absent all light. Supply light in enough areas, in the correct dosage, and color and detail and narrative emerge. Light is the reagent that starts the entire photographic process, the trigger. In that spirit, how can we ever know enough about it? How can we ever become adept in all its applications? And what bit of equipment, what device, what tech tweak can compete with merely making a passionate, all-consuming study of light? Light is the only upper-case word in photography. Everything else is merely gear and word salad.
Light presents. It stages. It defines. It caresses. It symbolizes everything from inspiration to hope to, in its absence, loneliness, despair, isolation. Light wraps around things. Leads the eye. Underscores the importance of whatever it falls upon. Changes the very character of what it comments on. Speaks loudly. Whispers softly.
Seattle, Washington, August 14, 2016, 8:08pm.
Light is Topic One for photographers. Do a Google search on the words “photography quotes about light” and you’ll see a cross-section of shooters from across several centuries, all saying what Uncle Ansel said so cleanly and perfectly. Know light, and a simple camera becomes an oracle. Know light, and you control everything about what an image is saying. Know light, and the rest will come.
There is a poetic brilliance to the Biblical account of creation, as God’s first command is literally “Let There Be Light”, as if the Big Guy were saying, “Good. Now I can see what the hell I’m doing…” The very word “photography” means to write with light. To illuminate and shape that which was undefined before, to confer meaning on what was merely the abyss. That’s an amazing power. Photography is an amazing power. And to the degree that you understand what makes the magic happen, it simply dazzles the soul.
BONES ON UP
On the way to being a decent image, but some judicious use of the scissors is in order.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE ILLUSTRATOR HAL FOSTER, who authored and drew the legendary comic strip Prince Valiant, was often praised for the naturalistic appearance of his drawn figures, an effect he attributed to the practice of building them up in stages. Foster told interviewers that he began at the skeletal level for the people he was drawing, then added in layers of muscle and skin, and finally clothing to make the figures as structurally sound as possible. Photography, in which many pictures are not so much composed as re-composed, can benefit from the same “bones up” approach.
Many of the scenes we snap in the moment are fixed in post-processing, with cropping being the most common tool. We amplify what is needed to tell our visual story and shave away the surrounding distractions. So take this idea a step further, if you will, and imagine that, instead of slicing off unneeded data that “fights” our picture, we are actually beginning with a tabula rasa (blank page) and selectively building elements into it until we get just enough data to make the image effective.
Two snips later; everything I need and nothing that I don’t need.
Take our friend on the beach here. Were I visualizing this scene as if I were building it up piece by piece, I would decide that I needed three main elements; the ocean, or at least a hint of it, explaining the surfer’s purpose; his stance on the sand, which indicates contemplation or intention; and the board, which is not in use, speaking to his unresolved thought process. Do I go now? What’s my approach?
That’s it. That’s the picture. Whether I have those elements in balance at the time I snap it, or crop it back to just those factors afterward, I have visualized the photo as I want the final version of it to be. Of course, in a real-life situation, my frame has also invited other elements that are either distractive or unneeded. For instance, I don’t need more of the waves to the surfer’s left, as they tell me nothing I can’t see with a closer crop, so out it goes. Mosto of the bit of seawall at lower right also conveys nothing important, nor does the other occupant on the beach to the upper right, so, snip, they’re out. And now comes the important question; is what I have left everything I need? Is there anything else that, by being removed, will actually boost the effectiveness of the resulting photograph? If the answer is “no”, then we’re done. I’ve done a Hal Foster, building the picture from the bones up and then stopping. Finis.
All of which goes to underscore that cropping is not merely a “fix” but an active tool. You’re not just cutting things away so much as you’re requiring them to earn their place in the valuable real estate in your images. You’re not losing “the big picture”; you’re inching closer to “the right picture.”
LIMITED, AND FREE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IN TECHNICALLY PREPARING FOR A PHOTO SHOOT, I find myself, as you likely do, walking a tightwire between having enough choice and fairly drowning in options. What to carry? What might I find to shoot? Is one lens enough, and are six too many? How can I cover every possible eventuality? What if I don’t take the right kit? What if I pack too much, too little?
Not exactly a recipe for enjoyment or relaxation.
In fact, it’s like hardwiring anxiety into a creative project before you even begin it, a conundrum addressed by Barry Schwartz in his visionary book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. There is, he explains, a real juggling act for most of us between variety and fatigue, a teeter-totter of indecision which leads to frustration and anxiety. I often imagine that the author of the phrase “fear of missing out” was a photographer, a guy who, no matter what he packed in his bag, is certain that he made the wrong call. Whatever he did, he should have done something else. Misery ensues.
I have logged many miles lugging a lethal load of gear on any and all journeys, only to find that, not only could I easily have gotten by with fewer tools, but that I polluted my potential enjoyment by being paralyzed by the sheer array of choices. Instead of being liberated by all those options, I was actually impaired by them, as was my photography. I was sapping my work of any sense of joy or freedom, emphasizing what I was going to use rather than what I was going to do. It took me a long time to realize that I was sabotaging myself under the guise of being “ready for anything”. I call it the golf bag approach, in which I saw my bodies and lenses like the woods and irons in a standard golf bag. The driver can’t do what the putter and wedge can do, and so on. But a camera is not a golf club. I’ve had to get accustomed to feeling freer by being more limited. An example: the image here was taken on a day when I was out birding with a telephoto that zoomed to 600mm. Not much use for a wide-angle, or anything that delivered that look, until this fellow sped by. If I stepped back, I could open to 180mm and get the shot I needed. Not a true wide-angle, but if I could make the same effect happen without changing glass, why not, said my aching shoulders and neck?
In Paradox Of Choice, Schwartz explains the importance of choosing a course of action that is likely to deliver most of the result you want without expanding your options to such a degree that you simply can’t move. The best photography is reactive, nimble, improvisational. You can’t plan it or diagnose it the same way you can with purely mechanical operations. And, as we have all observed, it is those moments of imprecision, even loss of control, that can produce the most pleasing results. None of us started out equipped with kit bags bulging with choices; it was a learned habit, one that can be unlearned. All we have to do is trust to our own instincts to make pictures with damn near any kind of tool, to ride that tightwire between Too Much and Not Enough with more confidence.
THE PRE-APERTURE APERTURE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
SHOOTING PHOTOS THROUGH A CAR WINDOW IS A PRECISE SCIENCE, much like loading mercury with a pitchfork. And while such images are occasionally among my happiest of happy accidents, we’re not talking about a procedure I’d recommend to the timid, or the impatient. Just think for a moment about all the impediments you have to navigate just to get a decent framing from a moving vehicle in the first place: rear view and side view mirrors: visors: dashboards: wipers: grime, grit, and dust: rain: warps: reflections: unwanted shadows: “C” pillars….. I could go on, but it’s just a lot simpler to say that, as a window, a window makes a lousy window.
But let’s suppose that you sidestep all those tiger traps. How much composing space are we talking for this “pre-aperture aperture”? And at what cockeyed angle? Chance are, even before you try to navigate the various “whoops” factors and do your standard calculation for exposure and so on, you’re going to feel the car quake as it bonks over a pothole, heave forward to avoid a late-crossing cat, or compensate for a stray ray of flare. At this point, any usable picture that results will be beyond heroic and qualify as damn near miraculous. So why do we sally forth on this Quixotic quest?
High Time at Hollywood & Highland, 2026
Well, really for the same reason we attempt any kind of picture under any kind of conditions; because it might work out. We are so hungry for success that we’re also gluttons for punishment. And consider that, in some circles, the impediments from my earlier list are actually regarded by some as more real, more authentic, desirable elements of the picture. Oh, yes, I meant to frame that billboard so that the rear-view mirror obscures half of it (hey, it got Dennis Hopper a career retrospective at the Met). As usual, your motives, and what you’ll endure to achieve them, are yours alone. Me, I’m transactional about the whole window thing. Do I need the picture? Will I ever pass this way again? Have I got time to juggle everything and maybe succeed despite everything? And on the off chance that it all works out, will I appear suitably humble?
TURN YOUR HEAD TO THE LEFT, PLEASE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY IS OFTEN PRESENTED AS IF IT WERE WRITTEN SOLELY by the medium’s inventors, but the complete story is a bit more complicated; in fact, many people who never clicked a shutter in their lives had a profound effect on photography’s societal impact.
Consider, for example, the humble mug shot.
Photographs had only been around for a few years before someone hit on the idea of using them in basic criminal identification. And while no one knows for sure who was the very first person to either pose the bad guys or be forced to pose for the good guys (Belgium, Australia, the U.K. and Philadelphia are all suspects), the record is clear on the non-photographer who turned the practice into a system, one of the first criminological data bases on earth, a “rogues’ gallery” as it used to be called, that even pre-dates the universal use of fingerprinting.
Meet Alphonse Bertillon, a French police officer and biometrics researcher who pioneered a system called anthropometry, a series of body measurements designed to create a specific physical record of everyone who fell under arrest, the first law enforcement reference work to identify features, marks, scars, etc., anything unique to the individual being detained. The first reference photos of criminals began sporadically in the 1840’s, but Bertillon had standardized the practice into a strict set of procedures by 1888. It was only one of many innovations he brought to crime detection, including casting procedures for taking molds of footprints and early comparative tables on ballistics.
Bertillon developed the format that, generally, is still used to the present day: one full-on view, accompanied by a right profile, with both shots housed in the same catalog entry: a neutral or blank background to minimize confusion about head and hair contours: a standard camera and lens used for all images. The photographs were initially added to the other elements of the anthropometric system, which consisted of several baseline measurements: head length, head breadth, length of middle finger, length of the left foot, etc. Together, they took what would, in any other context, be a simple candid photograph and make it an essential tool in crime detection, redefining at the same time what photography is “for”. Images are purposed and intended differently, depending on who creates them. We who receive them assign a variety of values to what we see. Can a photograph provide evidence based solely on how we judge a human face? Do we project a sense of menace or evil purely because of how and when we were photographed? Clearly, we are in an area where there are way more questions than answers.
GODS AMONGST US
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE RECENT GLOBAL ODYSSEY PHENOMENON seems to have revived a concept that has resonated from Homer’s day to this, with amazing permanence; the so-called “Zeus’ law”, which demands that you welcome a stranger as you would your own family or friends, lest you accidentally offend a god who just happens to be walking unseen amongst we mere mortals. It’s a kind of half-arsed version of the golden rule, but the idea is solid; don’t reserve all your courtesy and respect merely for the gods that are in plain sight.
I feel that way about photography at this point in time, an age in which the long-promised democratization of the art which was forever promised has, in the infinite file-sharing universe we now inhabit, finally come to pass. We have always been taught by the obviously visible gods of our craft, the Ansel Adamses and the Walker Evanses and the Bressons, holding out only a few photographic celestials as the tuning forks to which we, as aspiring shooters, ought to resonate. But if there is any truly miraculous thing about photography in this time, it’s that the skies are actually crammed with stars, not lit merely by a few twinkling outliers. We are absolutely awash in image innovation and excellence at all times, as billions crowd onto Flickr, Insta, and beyond. The work which used to compete for the limited space of the world’s brick-and-mortar galleries is now all around us, and not just when the museums are open for business.
I am, some sixty years into this business of making pictures, still trying to streamline my approach; less gear wielded with more skill: simpler, surer ways of sensing; a removal of distractions and dead-ends to the development of my eye. It’s the work of a lifetime, and I will never complete all its most vital lessons, but I am certain that, at least, I am still capable of being surprised, which frees me from the burden of “accepted wisdom” or any lessons I have learned from the accepted list of “masters”. For now, more than ever, I am keenly aware how many, many great eyes are operating out there, how many different kinds of truth-tellers are practicing beyond the narrow Temple Of The Elite we all were taught to revere. Photography is fashioned by people who aspire to the divine, and so we can best adhere to our own “Zeus’ Law” in training our eyes on as many gods, both small and large, as we can.
LIKE THE CORNERS OF MY MIND….
By MICHAEL PERKINS
HUMANS WORSHIP MEMORY MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THEIR BELIEF SYSTEM. Fact? Never heard of it. Religion? Not even close. The preservation of our sense of “how it really was” is a stronger urge than friendship, policy, custom, you name it….a quality that makes me marvel at the very special power photography holds in our lives.
hotographs, according to what we are taught to believe, are the preservers of memory. The camera measures light and records it from whatever is in front of it. Or so we continue to assume. In fact, the static preservation of an instant in a picture can be an unwelcome challenge, an intruder into our minds, where we “don’t remember it that way” and disbelieve anything that says different. The very precision of a photo isn’t just the way we hang on to memory. It can be an inconvenient challenge to something we carry in our own internal camera. We will swear on a stack of bibles that it actually happened this way, while the camera says it was actually more like this. And that’s a conflict.
It wasn’t soon after photography was born that we turned into societies of memory hoarders, and, year later, collectors of any and every totem of our popular culture. Antiques. Replicas. Reproductions. COLLECTibles. Every town in the world has a shoppe just like the one seen here, where we celebrate, in Paul McCartney’s words, “my ever-present past”. The discarded becomes the treasured. The long-ago becomes, to our minds, a lost Eden, a bygone golden age. Even as I myself have spent my elder years doing more and more with less and less, even as I’ve winnowed out many a once-prized life souvenir, I can’t always resist snapping a shot or two at places like this, joints that celebrate our most beloved belief that we have somehow lost something precious. But how can I make a picture of something that so many of us can’t agree on the terms of? What can a mere machine know, as compared to our own hearts and minds?
For some, a cardboard Dean Martin is enough to honor a memory. In the opinion of others, I’ve wasted my time trying to make a picture out of something as personal as remembrance. I’m never sure who is winning this debate. I only know it’s out there.
AN A.I. BY ANY OTHER NAME…
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ONE OF THE HALLMARKS OF THE DISCUSSION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, as it applies to photography, is the strident insistence by some shooters that “I will NEVER use that!”, our words to that effect. This statement presumes that A.I. is some forbidden room whose spooky contents can never harm you so long as you don’t open the door to it. But, as they say on the high seas, that ship, for most of us, has sailed.
The angrier among us act as if they are sacred photo virgins who have not yet been violated, as if we can maintain our virtue indefinitely if we but avoid using this app or that process, as if we have all been asleep for the past fifty years. This is, of course, nonsense. If you have ever used Photoshop or its many stepchildren, if you have ever touched a slider inside Photos for Mac, if you have ever used a flick-of-the-finger shortcut to instantly boost color, you have already entered into some nature of covenant, partnership if you like, with products that were built on our collective human experience, imbued with the ability to mimic that experience in a quicker fashion, at our command. That is as good a working definition of A.I. as anything else I’ve heard. We pour our knowledge into a huge tub of skills and ideas, and we deputize certain processes to serve that back to us in whatever configurations we order up.
This image shows the color range and saturation rate of the classic Fuji Velvia slide film (from theleft edge to the middle of the frame) and one of the more commonly available simulations of that particular film stock (middle to the right edge) that is likely already built into the camera that you own. If it’s not, you can easily dial up a step-by-step recipe for creating that simulation as a package of custom settings via the various menus on your rig. And this is certainly not a “cutting edge” example. Film sims have been available for years, and are an immediate and cheap substitute for the costly and complex effects that only used to be achievable by lab manipulation. In fact, in the case of this particular sim, it allows the kind of adjustment that, in the analog era, was impossible with slide film, which is a final positive, not a malleable negative. What you shoot is what you get, so to speak. But, to return to my point, how is this tech NOT A.I. by a more palatable name?
The technical processes that you choose to sweeten or adjust your images are not the sole determinant of what kind of picture you wind up with, any more than your camera or media are. You are that final decision maker; you hold the tools. So what difference is there between the adjustments you currently employ and another, newer way to make adjustments? A.I. does not take your choice away from you; in fact, it offers more choices, and choices of choices, than you could ever need in a lifetime. The only thing that can make your images less “you” is your decision to let your decisions be made by someone/something else. And that’s on you.
GET TOGETHER, YOU TWO
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ONE THING CITIES ABSOLUTELY DO; they force odd friendships and strange neighbors.
I once made a small gift book for a friend based solely on juxtapositions of unlike things. Weird pairings that, in many cases, were urban in origin. It was, in a way, an examination of the very nature of cities; their cross referencing, their hybridizing, their forced homogenization of dissimilar objects and conditions to create visual alliances between disparate things. Things that would likely never be forced alongside each other outside of a city. Things that have nothing to do with each other, except, of course, in a photographic frame, their concision becoming a study in contrast.
In Sesame Street terms, one of these things is not like the other. Or, more pointedly, how did they even cross each other’s paths? And is there some special quality to a frame that takes note of their being ill-matched for each other? And, yes, it is quite, quite, quite possible, easy even, to overthink such things.
But consider: do we want to understand why two seemingly random things are visually striking purely because of their mutual unfitness? Would it explain anything? In photographing them, don’t we risk undoing the magic of their occupying the same real estate if we try to decipher how they got there? The image you see here was taken in one of the busiest districts of Manhattan. But beyond that, I know absolutely nothing of either why this picture appeals to me or what created the conditions for me to see it, other than my randomly taking this turn rather than that turn down a street. How can I caption it? How can I explain it? Moreover, why would I even try?
Photographs are extractions, not unlike the act of unearthing the fossil of an ancient beast. Outside the trained eye of the paleontologist, the object has no context, nothing that anchors it in anything else except its effect on whoever discovers it. Isn’t that miracle enough? Cities and other frames of experience throw unrelated things into relationships with each other. We chronicle those collisions as wonders. Can any additional asterisking make those moments any more special?
FLIP EVERY ACE
Trust everyone, but cut the cards. ——-Irish Proverb
BY MICHAEL PERKINS
WHEN IT COMES TO OUTCOMES, MY PHOTOGRAPHY WALKS A KNIFE-EDGE between placing myself completely in the hands of fate and trying my damnedest to control everything. I can’t fully buy into either the philosophy that says, hey, whatever happens happens, just click the shutter, man or the belief that it’s only art once I’ve thoroughly messed with it. This cradle-rock between complete abandon and controlfreakdom creates a nexus where the real good stuff happens. I accept it.
I just don’t understand it, that’s all.
There are times when I just step up and shoot, instances in which I trust so much to chance or luck that I’m convinced that something good will happen, even if I’m not in charge of it. And there are other times when I truly try to exert my will, to whip the raw material into shape…somehow. In the moment that I make a picture, I rattle between these two poles but may not actually know that the process is happening. In reviewing old shots, however, I’m afforded the distance, even years later, to recall what the moment was like, that is, to suss out whether I was “what-the-helling” or consciously trying to massage something into happening. To, in effect, trust the dealer, but to still cut the cards.
To illustrate….
The last time I was on Liberty Island was mostly a day of taking “official” images. You know the ones. The contenders for the Sacred Postcard Tribunal, whoever they are. All the right angles and all the right lighting, as if you are working as a staff shooter for the Chamber of Commerce. And then there are the other shots, like the kind you can only get by, say, standing in front of the island’s visitor center (but the T-shirt!) and looking at Lady Liberty counter-intuitively, taking the shot nobody “wants”, as if she were walking away from you. What was I thinking? Was I thinking, or was I just swept up in the moment? I seem to recall that I was eager to try something, anything that smacked of a different approach. And so, if you had “he actually meant to do it” on your bingo card, get out your dauber.
Like I said, I accept this entire process.
But I’m damned if I understand it.
EVERYTHING NEW IS OLD AGAIN
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THERE IS ALWAYS A RISK, IN PHOTOGRAPHY NO LESS THAN OTHER TREND-FUELED ARTS, to make predictions about the next big thing, or even certain elements of What’s Happening Now, only to wind up eating a huge helping of crow further down the road. Simply stated, the prediction racket is largely a sucker bet, and anyone who goes into print saying they know what’s coming next ought to check to see if someone’s slipping something into their coffee.
That said..
As I write this, in July of 2026, the photo world is experiencing a bit of a time warp, as the presumed-dead compact camera is staging what can only be called a comeback, years after it seemed headed for the scrap heap at the hands of the smartphone. Sales figures tell a convincing story, with year-over-year sales of compacts up nearly 30%, even as sales of DSLR’s, a tech that was already in decline, continuing to slide and sales of mirrorless models basically stagnant. This means that the new crop of compacts is robbing customers from chiefly one place, and that’s cells.
Now, while most people, globally, will almost certainly continue to take most of their photos on a phone of some kind going forward, the fact that any of these users, who have long trumpeted the portability and ease of shooting on a cell, are deliberately choosing a camera-only device says something about changing attitudes; not only toward cameras, but also toward all the other junk that a phone brings along for the ride, including broken attention spans, unwelcome alerts, a less tactile experience, etc. There are already measurable micro-trends, seen primarily amongst the young, toward at least a partial un-plugging, with some purchasing apps to police their screen time, a rise in the purchase of “dumb phones” that only take and send calls, and other signs of a partial rollback of this very addictive form of tech.
The new surge toward compacts also represents a change in the performance levels of such cameras, many of which now deliver a high percentage of the tricks that were, just a few years back, solely the province of so-called “semi-pro”-level cameras. The new compacts also have a temporary cachet of cool based solely on their under-availability, since most manufacturers’ models are currently selling out (scarcity amplifies desire). Another ingredient in the recipe; the desire for a level of more participatory photography, or a “hands-on”, higher-control experience than even the best phone cameras can deliver. Finally, factor in the number of pitches on Tik Tok for “digicams” as yester-cool, and the deliberate retro-baiting done by designers to echo classic exterior features of vintage models (Look! Dials and switche, just like Gramps used to have!) and it’s not hard to account for the compact time warp.
As we said earlier, cell phones, and their cameras, are not going anywhere. What we’re seeing here looks a bit like the return to vinyl records; a niche, but not a tsunami. Still, anything that makes a goodly number of photographers ask, why am I doing this? or why do I want to do it this way? is healthy, and keeps the art form breathing.
WHAT ARE YOUR INTENTIONS?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
A picture in which an activity is implied, but is not yet fully underway….
PHOTOGRAPHERS HAVE FILLED ENTIRE LIBRARIES with commentary on what has become commonly referred to as “the decisive moment”, that one instant plucked judiciously from the infinite dots-on-a-line progression of time by shooters who have mastered the art of predicting when that precise second is approaching, then capturing it in a box before it’s gone. It’s a wonderful ideal. A seductive fantasy. And beyond the reach of most of us, even the great artists.
We keep hoping that photography will, if we really try, actually be reducible to a science. We dream about bringing the same degree of control to it that we might bring to splitting the atom. There’s a right way and a wrong way. Absolute failure or absolute success. Which begs the question, who lives in that world? Most of us try to keep our images within a bracket of acceptable results. We mostly produce kinda/sorta/almost/pretty close pictures. We get as near to the ideal as our weird mixture of skill and random fate will allow.
I certainly can’t claim that many of my own shots are so marvelously timed as to qualify for “decisive moment” status. Most of the time, in reviewing a shoot, I go through the same trial and error process that my optometrist (a licensed professional, mind you!) uses in prescribing glasses for me. Show the patient one lens, and then another one that’s nearly the same, and then a third lens based on whichever of the first two he chooses, and so on. Is this better…..or this? This….or this?
Now things are rolling a bit. More kids, more direct action.
In shooting rapidly changing subjects, such as the kids in these pictures, you often get a large number of shots that are “almost there”. There actually may not be a clear winner among them, but we drive ourselves crazy trying to determine which one came the closest to grabbing the brass ring. In the cast of these young explorers, I only had time to crank off two frames. The one at the top of the page signaled that they were up to something, but the second, just above, shows each child in a distinctly individual activity, with a variety of poses arranged in a more balanced form and with a few more than in the smaller group, making for a little more dynamic or “busy” frame, or at least one which is composed to suggest action. Neither shot is a masterpiece, but yet my mind wants one to be a clear favorite. Human nature, I guess. It’d be wonderful if I could rip off a picture that seems inevitable, as if it could only have been shot just that way, in just that second. A decisive moment. But here we are in the real world, where, sometimes, if we come within a country mile of what we intended, the whole day’s a win.
A MODEST DIAGNOSTIC EXERCISE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
AS I WRITE THIS, I AM SUFFERING A SEVERE ATTACK OF GAS.
Not the vaporous lockup of indigestion. We’re talking G.A.S., which is photographer shorthand for Gear Acquisition Syndrome, that vile affliction that makes shooters lust after gear that is erroneously assumed to be “needed”, in order for our picture-making skills to move to the next level. Such objects of desire are also known as Just What I Need, This Will Fix Everything, or Imagine What I Can Do With This Little Baby. Just like Odysseus, who had to be lashed to his ship’s mast to resist the sirens’ songs and thereby wind up wrecked on the shoals, camera buffs have to learn to sit out G.A.S. attacks when they break out, lest they founder their….wallets.
AND it comes equipped with “the new Conley Automatic Front Clip”! Where’s my cheque book?
Sad thing is, at my advanced stage of life (not to be confused with my emotional age, which still lingers in single digits), I no longer have the excuse of ignorance when it comes to being tempted by Bright Shiny Toys. The closets-full of camera gizmos I have been seduced into buying, later shoveling them into the dustbin of Time, have clearly taught me that, of all the gear I’ve purchased over a lifetime, a significant percentage of the haul was collected in the heat of emotion. I am particularly susceptible to the onset of G.A.S. when I am depressed, bored, or creatively stuck. The same thing happens to my wife under the same conditions, only she finds refuge in earrings instead of lenses.
Speaking of lenses, my latest object of desire, a G.A.S. contender if I ever saw one, has virtually nothing to recommend its adoption into my agglomeration of kit. Being a pancake lens, it is spare on features, boasting a fixed aperture (which has been demonstrated to be soft, even chromatically crummy at the edges of the frame). It’s manual-only, which is not, by itself a deal-breaker, but still. Most importantly, it cannot communicate with my camera body in any way. On the upside? It’s cute as hell. Lots of silver, chrome and copper, and it’s tiny, which is its own kind of weird sexy. And did I mention it’s cute?
My current G.A.S. buildup will probably dissipate without my reaching for a credit card. I already have a small fortune invested in prime lenses that actually might have a positive impact on my work, something I can’t honestly say about the little flirt dancing around in my brain at the moment. I will be repeating the non-fun mantra I really don’t need it for the balance of the day and hoping that the fever will break.
But, my God, is that thing cute.
in-DFN-itely
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I CAN STILL REMEMBER A TIME, NOT TOO DISTANT, when the phrase “the camera doesn’t lie” was actually spoken with a more or less straight face. I can only imagine that, at the dawn of photography, in the throes of the first great industrial age, the process of extracting and freezing time in a box was regarded as purely a recording function, like the undulations of a seismograph, as if the camera were the ultimate precision instrument for an ultimately precise, scientific age. In fact, however, fakery of all kinds was in the cradle alongside the camera; frauds were photography’s training wheels. That’s what makes the emergence of A.I. imaging so fraught. We were already manipulating and monkeying with our images using the conventional tools and methods we inherited from the Victorians. Now, suddenly, we can summon increasingly convincing fakes with a simple computer prompt….no camera required.
The joint issues of authorship and authenticity have been upended with A.I., a fact that, at this writing, is hardly a hot bulletin. But it bears repeating, just because our individual reaction to this new “reality” swings wildly between, “Amazing! I can make great use of that” to “ho hum, so what?” to “Oh, God! How can we stop this thing??” Just as it no longer matters whether a novel originates with the writer’s scrawl in a notebook, his taps on a typewriter, or entries in a word processor, we are now in a time when the idea of making a picture has been expanded to include techniques or tools that we once regarded as suspect, or even dishonest. However, if the final image is the desired end result, what do the intermediate steps matter?
An original daylight color shot becomes, with very little effort or strain, a “day-for-night” shot.
One of the first fakeries that I personally played with was the old movie technique known as D.F.N., or “day-for-night”, the exposure and processing methods that allowed crews shooting in broad daylight to suggest post-sundown tonal palettes, without the bother and expense of actually shooting at night. It was the first trick that got me thinking that photographs were far from a definitive record and more like an interpretive canvas, conferring the same fanciful control that painters had always enjoyed. So, years later, which challenges presented by A.I. actually offend or worry us the most? Is it the partial surrender of control to an entity that can’t truly exercise judgment in the creative process? Are we less artistic if we deputize a machine to carry out our desires, and isn’t that precisely what we’ve entrusted cameras to do? The struggle for a new meaning of what a “picture” is will throw some of us into a panic, while others will see it as the most obvious of opportunities for expression. The camera is dead, long live the camera? Or what, really?
SIGNATURE MOVE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE LINK BETWEEN CLASSIC CARS AND CALIFORNIA is an incredible, mythic bond, a marriage of American dreams. Even as we and the world are wondering, at least from an environmental standpoint, whether the romance has gone on for too long, even as we tearfully tender divorce papers to our old chrome-encrusted gas guzzlers, we Californians maintain a tearful love for What Was. It’s so easy to find a weekend show-and-shine in Cali that you might be tempted to think that God created strip mall parking lots solely so we’d have an easy way to stage seas of antique Fords and Chevys.
Awash in chrome, the classic logo badge from a 1958 Ford Fairline 500 Sunliner.
As a photographer, I find all this free-ranging power, color and style irresistible, but I’m fairly selective on what the sexiest portions of the entries are. It’s not the squeaky-clean, detailed engine compartments or the custom wheels, not even always the Cruise-Til-Ya-Drop cab appointments. For me, it’s the sheer elegance of the designer’s “signature” on the car, the badges, emblems, hood ornaments and company logos that grace the grills and hoods on the fronts of the cars. The car’s overall lines and contours are sinuous and sleek, to be sure, but it’s where the artist signed his name to his creation that encapsulates everything about the eras and ages that spawned these beauties.
It’s worth remembering that the first great designers of automobiles evolved from the companies that crafted luxury coachwork for horse-drawn carriages. The famous and now-bygone “Body By Fisher” emblem that was stamped onto the door sill plates of GM products for decades is, after all, the image of a coach, a nod to the Fisher family’s original blacksmith-based artisanal works. One of the hallmarks of automotive detailing, during the golden age of motoring, was the company name, branded on the front end with coats of arms, translucent plastic faux-stained glass, and Chrome, oh, my God, so much Chrome framing, well, everything. I dearly love to frame up entire classic cars, to glorify their every curve and cue from headlamp to tail light, but it’s in the small places where the company said, “we built this” that I can hear the roar of the engine, the whistle of the wind, and the squeal of the tires. Long ago, Zenith radios used to brag that “the quality goes in before the name goes on”, and, with classic cars, that signature speaks to excellence, pride, and, yes, a kind of immortality.
RAINY DAY, DREAM AWAY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MANY PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO SURVIVED THE INTERNATIONAL HOUSE ARREST OF COVID ’19 a few years back now benefit from a cool kind of inoculation, in that they may be forever cured of the dreaded “there’s nothing to shoot” ailment, that perennial complaint that no worthy subject matter is at hand. Certainly, boredom on the kind of global level that we experienced during the pandemic led many of us to dramatically revise our idea of “nothing”, as our houses and apartments became, for a time, our entire living environment, converting our immediate surroundings into ad-hoc studios.
Fasten-ation, 2026
During this sustained universal “sick-in”, I myself managed to document, measure, or comment on every angle, wall, and stick of furniture within my own place, and still found myself scrounging for something, not matter how ordinary or abstract, to photograph. I dug out lenses that had lain layered under dust for decades; I explored the settings that only normally appear on page 763 of the user manual; I catalogued my little behind off. The benefit was real, in that I had to seriously re-think what a picture is “about”, and stop thinking that something about my subject had to be “deserving” of a photo. My work became, in a way, more absolute, in that I was making images just to make images, and nothing more. I also had to change my idea of what subjects I felt I had already “done”, discovering, in more than a few cases, that I could easily take another run at them in search of a new element. And sometimes, of course, I was merely burning up days that suddenly had way too many hour in them.
That isolation, and the improvised approach to “work” that resulted, has stuck with me. I still hit days when I fear that it’s all been done, that everything worthwhile has already been snapped. I still have to force myself to produce something, anything on such days, as you can’t always wait for inspiration to come over you like some kind of spell. There once was a popular cartoon of two vultures sitting together on a tree branch, with one turning to the other and saying, “patience, my ass. I’m gonna kill something.” I like to think that, on a rainy, or quarantine, day, I can still go full-on vulture, if the need arises.
HALL PASS TO HEAVEN
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I WILL ALWAYS LOOK BACK FONDLY UPON MY FIRST, AND MOST TECHNICALLY LIMITED, days as a young photographer. I had gained entry to a world of wonder for the simple investment of five dollars, the cost of my first plastic box camera. The aperture and focus were fixed. There was but a single shutter button. All I could really control was whether I was smart enough to venture out in brilliant sunlight and where I chose to stand. The results, if we’re being kind, were, um, less than optimum. But I was in the club, and in the club I would stay.
The term “point and shoot” was not in great use in those days; that was largely a marketing term designed later to attract those who wanted the camera to do most of the work. And, of course, in the present day, it denotes a level of automatic precision that even so-called “grown-up” cameras couldn’t boast back then. Since that time, I have tried to escape the imposed gravity of that time, attempting to intervene as much as possible in the taking of a picture, to exercise as much personal control over the choices to be made. The idea of simply pointing and shooting, relinquishing my grip over the process, is largely a memory for me all these years later.
But there are exceptions.
Monterey Bay, California, October 10, 2010. 93mm, f/13, ISO 100, 1/100s.
There are still those rare occasions when all you really want to do is capture everything that’s in front of you, quickly, before it is gone. Places and moments where just bearing witness is almost more delight than your heart can hold. On such days, yes, you can agree to let the camera do most of the heavy lifting. You want no other thought in your head beyond Be Here, Now.
The morning of October 10, 2010 was just such a moment. My wife was attending a daylong library conference in downtown Monterey, California, leaving me nearly an entire morning to let the peninsula and bay reveal their miraculous beauty to me. I felt like a court reporter who can barely record a flood of fast testimony from the witness stand. My main thought was I have to get this down. I must have this. And this. And this as well. The entire time span of my random walkabout along the rocky shores near Pacific Grove that morning was probably less than an hour, and yet I felt like I was given some kind of all-access hall pass to heaven. The trip was one of the first real workouts with my new Nikon D60, and so the camera and I were still on a cautious kind of honeymoon. What’ll this thing do? Oh, it does that. Amazing. Because of the newness of our relationship, I was, on that morning, still largely defaulting to full auto on everything I was shooting, a mindset that put me in good stead, as the scenes before me were nearly foolproof; if you could frame it, the D60 would give it to you.
For photographers, being present beyond the distraction of dialing up settings can take a while to learn. There are days when you just want to scoop up everything you see without indulging in every possible calculation. But, like I said, there are exceptions. And when they happen, when they truly sweep you up in their wake, there is no better reminder of why you chose this life.
I COME FROM FAR AWAY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ONE OF THE LENSES WHOSE PRICE TAG I HAVE NEVER QUITE BEEN ABLE TO JUSTIFY is a dedicated macro, an optic made almost exclusively for super-close work. Perhaps if I had specialized in such shots, almost to the degree of a personal signature, I might have laid out the necessary cash, but my normal bent is to buy lenses that do at least two things well and cut down on the one-trick-ponies when I can. Call me cheap (as indeed, I am) but most of my glass is capable of at least a limited bit of multitasking. If macro ability is one of several tricks a lens can do (the Lensbaby Velvet series comes readily to mind) then great. Fact is, over the last ten years, I have done most of my macro work with a telephoto.
A parasol held by a woman dancing to a concert in a crowded courtyard some forty feet away from me. My Nikkor 180-600mm zoomed in for a faux-macro shot that I could never have made at close quarters. And with an aperture of f/6.3, I got good detail almost to the back edge of the umbrella.
I have certainly done my share of precariously hovering mere inches from a blossoming bloom, but I have achieved results that are just as satisfying standing thirty feet or more away from the flower and zooming in. Thing is, I hadn’t realized for years how many other people were doing the exact same thing. There are distinct advantages, such as a better control of natural light (my body can’t cast shadows on something from which I’m so far removed), a more generous depth of field (macros tend to be pretty shallow), and the ability to sneak into places that are too congested close at hand (like, for instance, the five other photographers who decided that they’d like to frame up “your” rose at the same time you’re trying it).
Of course, zooming in tight enough to produce great results with minute details is not without its problems. For one thing, there’s the stability issue. The farther away you zoom from, the greater is the risk of camera shake, where even minor movements like a shaky breath will be magnified to blurry effect. There is also the need to isolate your subject from the stuff behind or beside it, since that can create a cluttered result. The case I’m making here is not necessarily that packing a true macro isn’t a great idea at times. It’s really my ongoing argument for heading out with as little gear as possible, since a bagful of over-specialized glass can be weighty, unwieldy, and increases the risk of missed shots that flit away while you’re changing from one lens to another. If there’s one sentence I try to live by these days, it’s do the most with the least. A telephoto that occasionally doubles as a macro is one step toward that ideal.
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SERMON FROM A TOPPLED PULPIT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
(FIRST OF ALL, a loving welcome to all our most recent subscribers. You are the nourishment that feeds this beast. Thankee.)
TO RESTATE THE TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT for anyone entering this movie after the first reel, The Normal Eye has never been a photographic “how to”, since the world at large is fairly overrun by technical experts who can offer much more qualified testimony than I can, on gear, or what makes it work. If anything, this little small-town gazette is more of a “why do”, a perpetually unanswered question on the motivations behind why we make pictures. I can only safely recount what has worked for me, and me alone. If something in my process sparks an idea for you, swellwonderfulgroovy, but my notes here are just diary entries, not preachments. You do you, and all that.
I mean, think about it.
I’d really have to have some nerve to recommend or prescribe anything for anyone when, a significant portion my work fits into a very fat “WTF” (Weirdly Troubling Fotos) folder, composed of stuff I myself do not understand, as if, looking at them long after I shot them, I’m actually reviewing the work of a complete stranger. I’d actually love to have a picture of my own expression as I leaf through this stuff, always with the same questions. What is this? Why did I think that would be a picture? Why don’t I remember ever having done this?, and so on and so on. Far from communicating some golden eternal truths to the world at large, some of my photographs manage to confound even me. Especially me.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this. You no doubt have some kind of WTF folder of your own, stacks of misbegotten, weird-ass orphan images that seem to have jumped, unbidden, out of your camera. How could you not? Creative urges are just that, urges, and ofttimes make no more sense than one’s decision to, yes, please, have a third hot dog. And so, as we go forward, I always like to pause a mo, to re-state that The Normal Eye is more of a journal (journey? journal!) than a blog. Over its fifteen years, it’s been the closest thing to a running testimony on where I’ve tried to go as a photographer, and as a person. It’s not a blueprint for anyone, nor a bread crumb trail to help you find your way out of your personal dark forest. It’s justa buncha pitchers, flavored by some random ruminations, with all the lucky keepers at the front of the stage and all the WTF detours as a painted backdrop. Cheers and welcome.
WHAT ARE WE SELLING HERE?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO ARE ALSO BABY BOOMERS learned their craft in a unique pocket of time, a period that saw an astounding series of breakthroughs in the art and science of picture-making. I could make a day of just ticking off aspects of the art that have been revolutionized, miniaturized, re-formatted, re-invented and re-tooled in my lifetime, which tracks from 1952 onward. However, just to zero in on one fundamental change, there is the transition from the last days of the complete dominance of monochrome to the global default to color. It was like learning to chew with baby teeth and then doing your serious, growed-up eating with your “keeper” teeth.
I shot this rusty door in both color and monochrome. In this particular case, mono “sold” the worn texture a little better. It’s all about choices….
When I first picked up a camera, many amateurs had not yet made the jump to color, mostly for economic reasons. B/W was just cheaper. For others, home developing largely involved mono, while color processing tended to be the domain of labs. Black and White was more hands-on, with its various steps and stages serving as a part of an immersive, complete sequence of creativity. And then there was the distrust of color by creatives at the level of an Ansel Adams, who grudgingly worked in color but embraced monochrome, given that, in his opinion, the reproduction science for color work in print had not yet been perfected, and while he could easily control (and predict) the results of his mono images. Given these factors and several others, I, like many others in Boomerville, cut my particular set of baby teeth learning to make acceptable pictures in black and white. My dad, who had an actual job, and thus a little more disposable income to play with, shot in color.
And so, for me, to have lived long enough to enter a third phase, in which black and white has made it through the unofficial runner-up status conferred on it when color first hit its stride…to come out the other side of that time tunnel, newly empowered, newly valued as just one of many valid ways to make a picture…well, it’s exciting. When I shoot now, I frequently toggle between pre-programmed settings profiles for both color and mono, taking several different tonal versions of nearly everything. I can then make a determination, later on, on the major questions in photographic narrative: what are we selling here? What tools get the storytelling most effectively done? What tone, what texture, what range of value will convey what I’m seeking? And, most importantly, can I be open when something I was not seeking comes through by happy chance? I was born a mono kid who became a color shooter as an adult and then came to embrace everything, everyday, all at once as a senior. Lucky.
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