ARE WE BEING SERIOUS NOW?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THIS MONTH MARKS AN IMPORTANT MILESTONE IN PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY, in that it was almost exactly ten years to the day that a major news magazine, on deadline amidst a horrific disaster, decided, for the first time, to run a cellphone image from an Instagram posting as its cover picture. The devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was, due to the newly accelerated penetration of mobile photography, covered to a much greater degree by the average shooter, but it was one very above-average professional, news photographer Ben Lowy, who provided the magazine with the image that would define the destruction and fury of the superstorm, and he took it not with his usual battery of Nikon and Canon gear, but with an iPhone 4S.*
This seems trivial in retrospect, but at the time, it actually represented a fairly seismic shift, as publications changed their idea of what constituted “real” coverage of a major new event. It also conceded what millions around the world already knew in their DNA: that their camera of convenience was now, also, their device of choice, their “real” camera. if you like. Lowy himself explained the mindset: “People don’t think twice about it. It’s a fast little camera, and I do like that on a tough assignment. At times, though, ‘pros’ will push me aside, assuming I’m a tourist or amateur. It’s the mind of the photographer that defines the quality of the image, not the equipment. Everyone has a pen, but not everyone can draw.”
Just as the average phone shooter knew by 2012 that the best camera is the one you have with you, so the world of editors had to grudgingly admit that a picture is a picture is a picture and who the hell cares what it was captured on? Of course, we know the answer to “who the hell cares”, as we all know people who argue that you need a “real” camera to get artistic results, at which point I remind them how many Pulitzer Prize-winning images are, in fact, underexposed, blurry, badly composed, or askew, despite the fact that they were made by world-class equipment. They copped Pulitzers because, despite how much we may spend or scrimp on gear, in the end, a compelling picture trumps everything else.
I have made my own dog-legged journey in my conception of a “good” camera, the device I would count on to make the “official” or “permanent” images of an important event or place. When traveling, for instance, I still use my mobile for snapshots, experiments or “pencil sketch” versions of things, bringing my formalized equipment in to render the “final” edition. I’ve gradually become more and more even-handed in budgeting shots between my “casual” and “serious” camera, but I know too well that I am behind a kind of global curve in thinking this way. Turns out photography is not merely about perfecting one’s technique, but also about perfecting the brain behind the shutter finger.
*Full disclosure: a bit of texture was added to Lowy’s shot before it was posted, not with Lightroom or Photoshop, but with the phone app Hipstamatic.
BEATING WINGS, BEATING HEARTS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
OF THE OVER 73,000,000 ACRES OF LAND IN THE STATE OF ARIZONA, only 43.2% is in private hands. That might, on paper, seem to weigh in nature’s favor, if “favor” means being protected from the more horrible by-products of human activity. However, from my the vantage point of my twenty-three years in Phoenix, the state’s largest urban concentration, it can seem like nature is either whipped to a draw by civilization (on a good day) or bound, gagged and locked in a dark closet by it (on all too many other days).
A bald eagle finishes a meal atop a concrete platform, just yards away from the 202 freeway in Tempe Arizona.
Nature photography in such a conflicted reality can be a challenge, but not because wildlife cannot be found near Arizona cities. In fact, rather than fleeing to the open desert or mountain ranges, it often thrives literally feet away from the most invasively harmful aspects of what we term “civilization”. No, the problem with making pictures of Arizona wildlife is in being tempted to do what I call “template photography”, to take the expected route toward idealization of animals, displaying them in the pristine conditions in which we wish they lived all the time. And yet, if we are to follow any tendency toward photojournalism, toward honestly chronicling the lives of these creatures in such a place, we must also make images of their struggles and triumphs within the world we have actually made for them. And that can be heartbreaking.
This is especially true in the case of birds, and most dramatic with larger varieties like raptors. The bald eagle you see in these images has learned to make his way alongside freeways, electrical wires, air traffic and other delights of the modern age, choosing, as seen here, the concrete footing for a bygone bridge over an urban stretch of the Salt River as the roosting point for enjoying a fish captured from what was, very recently, a dry bed deliberately replenished and stocked by the same governmental agencies charged with making the desert, well, “livable” for humans. It’s a strange and sad symbiosis, but it makes for enduring images. An eagle left to his own devices exists in an interlocking gearbox of interdependent ecosystems. It exists in balance. It’s brushing up against us that makes his life more hazardous than anything encountered in the wild.
Strangely, we begin to address this problem by addressing our own. If power grids go down because of birds becoming entangled in our wiring systems, those systems need to be re-designed, which has the dual effect of protecting more birds while guaranteeing that we keep our lights on. People are becoming more aware of how our own lives are impoverished if we make it impossible for creatures to grow and hunt and prey as nature intended, but, my God, the learning curve has been slow. How many of the motorists seen here, made aware of the majesty couched just yards away from their elevated roadways, might pull over, park, gawk and wonder? How many beating wings and hearts throb on, outside the scope of our impaired hearing? And how can we point our cameras at the wildness left in the world without also showing how our own untamed selfishness threatens that divine, raw beauty?
A WALK ALONG “K” STREET
An example of a custom mix of in-camera pre-sets designed to emulate the bygone Kodachrome film (details at bottom of page).
By MICHAEL PERKINS
KODACHROME FILM HAS, AT THIS WRITING, BEEN GONE FROM PLANET EARTH for thirteen years (!), and yet it continues to echo through the corridors of nostalgia for photographers of a certain age. As the first widely sold and truly practical color film shot by millions, its native strengths (and biases) in color rendition were enshrined across billions of images as a specific way of seeing the world. People try to characterize its look with adjectives like natural or warm or dozens of other modifiers, all of which fall short in comparison with the act of just looking at its effect. Photography may be the art that is most self-referential, in that we never completely live in the moment, but always have the looks, or systems, or tools of earlier versions of that art peering over our shoulders. Kodachrome is dead. Long live Kodachrome.
Just as we have never stopped simulating sepiatone, the painterly aspects of the Pictorialist movement of the early 1900’s, or even emulsion-smeared glass plates, we have never stopped trying to emulate the look of Kodachrome. The web is littered with the photographic equivalent of recipes that claim to be able to perfectly mimic McDonalds’ secret sauce, promising to conjure up the perfect re-creation of the big K’s tones and flavors. Nearly all of these are post-processing techniques in Lightroom or a half-dozen other editing suites, with a few puny phone apps, mostly horrible, taking a crack at the task here or there. Recently, however, there have been more and more tips on pre-sets that would allow shooters to do faux K-chrome in-camera, which is what would most appeal to me personally. Fuji users got the ball rolling by cooking up their own specific how-to’s, and I have recently been kitchen-testing a mix I stumbled across for Nikon’s Z-platform mirrorless cameras*. We are now in the “tasting” phase of the process. Too salty? Needs garlic? Who knows?
Another exposure of the above subject, this time with standard color rendition.
What’s easy to see in the two “with” and without” images seen here is that there is a decidedly different rendering of the range of reds and yellows, a hallmark of Kodachrome’s warm appearance (and key to its wonderful skin tones). The ability to store a bundle of settings in a special separate dial click (such as the “U” or user buttons on Nikons), so that it’s available virtually on demand, is of great value to me, since my camera has an electronic viewfinder, allowing me to see precisely what will be captured on the sensor in real time. That flexibility is worth more to me in the field than all the after-the-fact editing suites in the world. Is the ersatz K-chrome seen here much different than merely using, say, a very warm white balance setting, such as “shade” or “cloudy skies”? I’m still weighing all that, even as I’m trying to weigh my emotional fondness for this bygone film versus whether the look of it actually adds anything to what I’m doing. Do I love it because I loved what I was doing, back when I was first using it? Is a walk down “K” Street just a stroll down Memory Lane? Again, the final verdict comes picture by picture.
*For those who care: From the Nikon Photo Shooting menu, select “Set Picture Control”. Select menu item 15 for RED and set the level effect to 20. Within that sub-menu, set Filter Effects to GREEN with a toning level of 7, and then exit Photo Shooting. Set White Balance control for Direct Sunlight. Finally, to imitate the low ASA (ISO) of Kodachrome, you might experiment with slight under-exposure for deeper saturation. Or not, your mileage may vary.
INNER CATHEDRALS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
CALL IT THE WEAR AND TEAR OF A LIFETIME: call it a loss of faith: call it wisdom, if you prefer. Whatever the cause, I can no longer pray as I so easily and fervently did as a child. Maybe I should be considered “lost”, although I actually feel freed. Maybe I should be pitied, although I sometimes feel I should be envied. Suffice it to say that no building, no symbol, no text gives me that once-natural feeling of connection and community in the same way that a camera does.
The ways that I engage the world with a camera acts, in some ways, as my version of a prayer. In contrast to the petty entreaties that Junior Me sent heavenward in search of my various wants or desires, I find that learning to see the broad miracle that is existence, and trying to fix impressions of that onto various media….that is praying. Not a request for anything from a person, and not as a mere ritual or habit, but still a potentially sacred act.
Photography has become my way of saying thank you to everything, or nobody, in a language that mere verses and scriptures can no longer express. When I take seemingly disparate conditions or elements and cohere them into an image, that’s about as close to the act of creation as I am liable to get. Is the picture an offering, a sacrifice? Actually, it can be that, plus a lot more.
Prayer is thought to be about humility, of realizing that your arms are too short to box with the universe and trying to get said universe to stretch its own arms toward you, to meet you halfway. Photography, or really any art, is an attempt to get those two sets of arms linked. When it works, it produces in me a larger “answer” than anything else to the question, “what’s it all about?” Prayer, for the younger me, was about helping myself feel less alone, to tap into something broader and deeper than myself. And when I celebrate the vast variety of life, then try to share those secrets out with the larger world…well, if that isn’t holy, then I have no idea what is.
V.I.P.V.P’s
By MICHAEL PERKINS
GO ON.
We’ve all done one. Indulge yourself. You know you want to.
Well, I want to, anyway.
The classic Vanishing Point shot. Two parallel lines that seem to converge as they reach the horizon. A kind of “first love affair” shot for budding photographers. A lotta depth, a lotta drama. Train rails receding into infinity. Rugged trails vanishing into adventure. Or, in this case, a seaside pier drifting off to Dreamland. Yeah, it’s a cliche. Yeah, it’s the world’s cheapest optical effect. And we all love it.
Someday I’ll actually walk a seaside pier without doing one. Or not. All it takes to hook me is the odd Ferris wheel, or crab shack, or pair of lovers walking hand-in-hand, or some crazy guy busking, and I’m sucker enough to think the shot is somehow different, enough to turn a plain old VP into a VIP. Piers are a strange linkage, anyway. Not quite free of the land, but not a true part of the land’s overall rhythm either. A transition bridge between worlds. You’re either almost embarking to somewhere or almost home from somewhere. Maybe the vanishing point is magnetic visually because of what it suggests, since much of photography’s power comes from what it does not, or cannot, show. I dunno. I’ll have to save that for my thesis.
In purely tech terms, the classic receding horizon shot benefits most from a true wide-angle, such as the 28mm used here, since, by shooting wider, it creates more places in the frame for objects to track from front to back, making the sense of depth greater and pulling the eye deeper into the image. However, the appeal of the VP operates on some more profound, emotional level. It reveals and conceals at the same time, setting up the mystery which originally sent us making pictures in the first place.
DETAILS, DETAILS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MOST OF THE LOUDEST ARGUMENTS ABOUT THE USE OF COLOR in photography have, over the past sixty years or so, been turned on their heads. Before color film became the dominant medium for amateur shooters, roughly after WWII, elites within the fine art community, that is, the people operating at the Ansel Adams level of control and command, frequently debated whether color was of any value at all. Part of their argument stemmed from the primitive processing technology of the time, which made many photographers feel that color either exaggerated reality to an intolerable degree, or, worse, that really great color work looked flat or inaccurate in magazines or prints.
As I say, though, two thirds of a century can make a big difference, and for some time now, color has been such a prevalent default choice that it’s the decision to work in monochrome that is now questioned. Certainly b&w has not vanished from the earth, but, while it was thought of as a medium of imagination and fine control before color, it is now seen by some as limiting, “less than”. And that’s too bad.
Black and white invites speculation, an additional layer of interpretation on the part of the viewer. He or she must supply, out of their own imagination, something which is not stated in the original. Nearly everyone has some mental concept of colors, personal palettes so ingrained that we can seem to “see” them even when they are not shown to us in an image. That is, we have an internal way of visualizing color where there is none.
I keep detailed presets for both color and mono shots stored in my camera, so that I can switch back and forth between modes with very little delay. As a result, some of the images I shoot in color have an almost 100% compositional convergence between the b&w and color versions (see examples here), giving me the ability to shoot and evaluate quickly in the field, while the subject is before me in real time. If a subject is important to me, I nearly always ask myself whether it is better served in one medium or the other, and usually shoot it in both as a mental insurance policy against my own indecision. I mention the presets because I believe that sculpting the precise degree of contrast, sharpness, etc. in camera is far superior to merely desaturating a color shot later in post-processing.
Eventually, it’s freeing to arrive at a place where neither color or mono are “givens” for every situation but have to earn their use in each particular frame. All tools can be used for anything, but no tool will work for everything.
PIER GROUPS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
CIRCUSES ARE GONE. Carnivals are on life support. In most towns, there’s not a Chautauqua tent or traveling acting troupe to be had for love or money. Eccentricity, the wild, sharp-edged, warped neighborhood between Normalcy and Madness that used to be a part of every town the whole world ’round, appears to be shuttering. But there are still a few enclaves of the weird to be had, and celebrated. And pictures to be made of what remains.
To paraphrase Bogart, we’ll always have beach towns.
Strange little encampments near the water’s edge that are both the last chance for humans before the open sea and a natural collection point for a slew of strange energies, from craftsmen to shopkeepers to fishermen to tourists….a grand collision of urges and callings that celebrates the odd, the original and the openly quirky. Life is measured differently near the ocean. The smells and color schemes are different. The architecture is chockablock, random and loud. And the folk are charting their own course.
In such venues, you might encounter the Violin Lady, in her pert hat, her lacy blouse, and her concert-plus-art-sale gig on nearly any block. Further in from the coast, the forces of order have issued enough cautious ordinances to muffle all the lovely madness of her kind, whereas, in towns like Seal Beach, California, she’s just one more cast member. And, lest you believe that she’s “selling out” by peddling her paintings for profit, bear in mind that she’s also revealing Real Truth about “My UFO Encounter”, which makes the entire enterprise a public service, really.
Use your camera to celebrate the unique. It’s always in danger of being smothered beneath a blanket of respectability, a quality which might be morally admirable but is, sadly, pictorially stagnant. If weird is in short supply in your town, head for the beaches, and you’ll get it all back. And then some.
HEATED DISPUTE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ONE OF THE KEY CHALLENGES IN SHOOTING WITH TELEPHOTO LENSES (and there are many) is in executing a stable shot. Simply stated, at the upper range of a lens’ magnification, there is an exponential increase in camera shake, with the usual remedies being either a more solid grip by the shooter or the use of a tripod, depending on the prevailing conditions. However, another problem, one that is much harder to either anticipate or control, can render images soft or blurry, despite the shooter’s best preparation, and that is the dread disease known as heat shimmer.
A long zoom means focusing over great distances, all of which might be experiencing the release of heat at the same time, blurring detail, and making straight lines look like they were drawn by a drunk monkey armed with a half-melted crayon. The result is a marked degradation in the image, especially at zoom ranges above around 300mm. Mind you, unstable air is just one of several challenges that plague telephoto shots. There is the loss of light as you zoom in, the size and efficiency of the camera’s sensor, even inconsistent color rendering. The raw truth is that heat shimmer is next to impossible to plan for, and, once in your master image, impossible to remove. The only real question is, in a particular picture, is whether you can live with it.
The topmost shot of the copper-topped tower of the iconic Bullock’s department store building on Wilshire Boulevard in mid-town Los Angeles, which I shot with a Nikon Coolpix P900 “superzoom” at around 650mm, shows this crummification effect at its worst. To be sure, decades of air pollution and weather have reduced the sharper edges of the tower appreciably since the 1930’s, but, as you can see from the stock image just above, I have paid the price for zooming across several hot rooftops and reflective surfaces that are all adding to the already compromised sharpness. It’s always hard to get the top of the Bullock’s building from street level, and so I used the occasion of an upper-floor hotel window to go for broke, and “broke” is pretty much what I got. And, yes, we could also argue that I should have shelled out three or four thousand dollars for a dedicated zoom with better optics, but as I have foolishly chosen food and clothing over a third mortage for a lens of such nature, we’ll stick a pin in that discussion.
The clearest cause of the overall softness of my shot lies in the heat shimmer factor, which may or may not have been better or worse had I waited for another time of day. Sadly, despite all our craft and cleverness, fate still packs plenty of uncertainty into the process of making images, and this time around, it bit me squarely in the rear quarters. But it’s like they say: if you can’t take the heat, get out of the hotel window…..
THE NOTHING-TO-LOSE CLUB
By MICHAEL PERKINS
TAKE ENOUGH PHOTOGRAPHS AND YOU WILL FIND YOURSELF acting more deliberately, and thus less reflexively. Your snapshot mind, the scatter-shot, try-anything part of your brain that acts purely on impulse, is never completely eradicated, but is suppressed, tamed if you like, by a more careful and selective way of seeing things, a habit of taking additional time to size up a situation before you shoot. This evolution in style is to be expected, as you learn, over the years, that a few extra moments of mental prep can yield consistently better results than merely shooting from the hip.
And yet.
It’s not really healthy to let the prudent half of our brains win every argument. Likewise, we should never completely renounce our membership in the “Nothing To Lose” club, that proud aggregation of people who will always, always go for the shot, despite the realizations that I Brought The Wrong Lens, The Light’s Not Exactly Right, or It Probably Won’t Come Out. Don’t get me wrong: I love, love, love to think that my extra seconds of calculation and forethought will consistently give me better results. And, often, I am proven right. But shooting on instinct, in fact being comfortable with both randomness and uncertainty, can sometimes bring home the bacon as well. The only uniformly wise option is: always shoot something, or, as they say in politics, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
The Vibe On Vine, Los Angeles, September 2022
This windshield shot, taken on the fly during a recent ride down Vine Street in Hollywood, represents such a case. The car was not going to stop: it was not in our plans to get out, set up a formal composition of these iconic buildings, or take a walking tour through the neighborhood. And so I found myself, once again, a member in good standing of the Nothing-To-Lose club, and I got, well, what I got. And of course there are technical flaws galore in the shot, not the least of which is severe color imbalance caused by shooting through glare and factory window tinting, resulting in the loss of nearly a stop of light.
But I can live with the bruises on the peach because, generally speaking, I got to eat the peach. I may or may not be able to return to the scene in future to try for a four-star job, but, in the meantime, I can chalk this one up to what you might call a workable preliminary sketch, and stop stressing about it. Because, in the final analysis, by failing to at least try, I did have something to lose.
The fun of making a picture.
NO WORDS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE NON-STOP SELF-PROMOTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY (of which I am certainly a part) that has been created by the internet seems, to me, to center as much on explaining our pictures to each other verbally as it does trying to give them more impact visually. That is to say that we gab a lot a lot a lot about how we got our result, with increasingly text-heavy captions on the precise settings and processing that went into the project. Sometimes, it seems as if we believe that, if we gab enough, that alone will make the pictures more special.
I don’t believe that is true, which is why The Normal Eye has never been about “how I did it” as much as “why I did it.” For me, it’s simple: motivation outranks technique. Every. Single. Time.
Come To Me, All Ye That Are Burdened, 2022
I have never written a single caption that succeeded in “explaining” a picture, that made it a better storyteller than it already was. In trying to explain an image, I sometimes feel I am only calling attention to its poor power to make its own case. Any words I add to detail the execution of a photo prove inadequate to illustrate the special something that occurs (or fails to occur) once I’ve made a series of technical calculations. Such footnotes cannot express my motivations or dreams. They don’t make plain why, sometimes, I do everything “correctly”, and yet wind up with a picture where nothing is “right”…..or, more importantly, how, other times, despite my having fouled up every possible bit of intentional planning, the picture is unmistakably just there, that it somehow fought its way into life despite my own utter ineptitude. As an example, the above image is one that, in terms of technique, I have made dozens of times. And yet, this one, for me, made it into some other category. Something, if you’ll excuse the expression, clicked.
Finally, why even bother to make a picture if you can express your feelings better in words? How can you talk enough to redeem a shot that, essentially, didn’t work? Is a poor image any clearer because we slather more talk on top of it, like frosting a tasteless cake? Captions are occasionally a necessary evil, and, to the extent that they convey purely technical information, like lens or aperture used, they can at least be instructive on a purely technical level. But they don’t explain what a picture does or does not convey.
That is the picture’s job.
THE SUDDENING
By MICHAEL PERKINS
WHEN IT COMES TO OUR MOST PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHS, we often reach an appreciation of them long after they are taken…..that is, after the delicate things we preserved in them have been largely taken away. We become misty-eyed curators of our own lives, remarking about “how young we once looked” or “man, I loved that car”, demonstrating just how delicate an operation it is to seize moments from those we love even as, in real time, we are trying to savor them. Much of the time, pictures are a sorry substitute for actual experience, a kind of take-home consolation prize. Sorry, you don’t get to keep the thing in your life that is real….but here’s a two-dimensional, incomplete souvenir.
My wife Marian has been my most constant muse over the active years of my picture-making, and it’s always a balancing act when I see her doing something that I want desperately to keep. I have to, to a degree, yank myself out of the suddening she is in, the real, beating moment she occupies, and step back into a more objective role, more commentator than witness. I always get to keep some small part of who she was at that instant, but I have to become less real for her while I attempt to steal it away from time. It’s an odd bargain.
I could fill a bookshelf with moments in which, for an instant, I feel like I am seeing her again for the first time, the second the thunderbolt first hit me. In such settings, she is every age of her life, from toddler to elder, in a twinkling. That creates a challenge beyond the reach of any mere technical device, and so, like a squirrel visually drunk at the site of a tree with a thousand acorns lying beneath it, I have to quickly select what I hope is the best acorn within reach, and make good my escape. Portraits of anyone are made of such grab ‘n’ snatch instincts, but when it’s someone you love to your very core, the task is even more daunting.
Sometimes you get a 4 out of 10, or even, very rarely, a 7 or 8. The fact that no one has ever gotten a 10 should never deter you, however. All you need to keep in mind is that a miracle is playing out before you, right this minute, and that trying to grab “a suddening” is a worthy goal.
IT’S NOT US, IT’S YOU
If it ain’t dead, don’t kill it.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
AS I WRITE THIS, THE WORLDWIDE CAMERA MARKET IS UNDERGOING THE KIND OF SPASM that always presages either the introduction of a new format or the imminent demise of an existing one. In this case, we are seeing the accelerating death of the DSLR platform as it is being edged out by mirrorless models. The transition from the former format to the latter has been underway for about ten years, but at a fairly leisurely pace, with both legions of adherents billeted in separate but fairly non-contentious camps. That, however is finally coming to a head, in what I see to be an ugly trend.
And it’s all happening because the camera companies want it that way.
The single-lens reflex camera has been the global standard for serious photography for two generations now, and, if you ask its users, that tradition could go on for another two generations and they would regard that as just fine, thank you very much. However, the manufacturers want it gone, and, since that’s happening too slowly to suit them, it’s time, in their estimation, for a little nudge to speed the platform’s demise. Mirrorless cameras are in some ways an amazing advance, and I speak here as a recent convert to them after years of DLSR devotion. However, part of my “seeing the light” is due to my also seeing the handwriting on the wall, as Nikon, Canon and others are simply abandoning the DSLR format: first, by withdrawing more and more models from their product line, and then by slowing and eventually halting the introduction of any new models, especially entry-level ones, onto the market. Time marches on, of course, and old tech is always being obviated by the new, but usually with the eager approval of the consumer, who recognizes the value of the latest and the next and demands it. However, in this case, I believe that the DSLR’s fan base is not jumping: it’s being pushed.
Or, to address the manufacturers in a reverse of the old breakup cliche: it’s not us, it’s you.
Scanning scads of sites and chat forums, I simply do not see a global urge for the DSLR to be summarily discontinued. Certainly, there is plenty of enthusiasm out there for mirrorless, but many people either believe the new systems are either too expensive or too limited in lens choice or both, and many others would be just as content to replace their aging DSLRs with newer ones, if they could be sure that the format would continue to be supported by the manufacturers. And there is a very present fear that the market will be dominated by mirrorless simply because the companies want it that way.
To be clear: I am no Luddite. I believe it is beyond foolish to stand in the way of true progress, and I welcome technical advances that truly work to extend an artist’s reach or speed his progression. New photographic formats can do this. But there is also a lot to be said about being able to make pictures with the tools that work best for you. Tech should serve, not dictate, the terms of artistic engagement. It’s about the painter, not the latest brush. In the case of the rapidly advancing end for DSLR’s, the Big Makers are choosing their own expediency over the desires of their customers. That doesn’t feel like a natural death for the format. More like a murder.
NOT (QUITE) MY FIRST RODEO
By MICHAEL PERKINS
YOU SEE HERE THE ONE CAMERA I OWN THAT IS BOTH the primary cause my lifelong love of making pictures, and the only camera I have that I have never taken a single image with. It seems absurd, but upon examination, it makes perfect sense.
I was a small child when my parents bought this Kodak. I never touched a dial or button on it, but it nonetheless shaped my earliest awareness of what happens when you perform the magic of freezing time in a box. It preserved family gatherings, first steps, birthdays, vacays, and the everyday rhythms in the suburban midwest life of the 1950’s and ’60’s. The images that it produced, 35mm Kodachrome slides that took three full days to come back from the processor, splashed big-scale color and delight across our living room wall for over ten years. The arrival at our house of a new yellow and red Kodak box was like getting an extra Christmas.
The Kodak 828 camera was one of four fairly simple “Pony” models that Kodak cranked out by the millions from 1949-1959, and ours was the only one of the models that used 828 roll film. The format was designed to allow for the manufacture of more compact, entry-level cameras that could use what was essentially 35mm stock and yet produce substantially larger images by eliminating the use of sprocket holes. It had a 51mm fixed lens that could only shoot at one of four shutter speeds, with apertures ranging from f/4.5 to f/22 and a rudimentary distance/focus dial. The use of even amateur cameras of the time required deliberate calculation, planning and not a little luck, and so, as you might imagine, our family’s near misses (and outright fails) with the Pony became the stuff of family legend, every bit as much as our keepers.
More importantly for me, the camera taught me, as its admiring non-user, to dream beyond my own limits. Once I got my own no-controls box camera at the age of thirteen, I went through a period of horrible discouragement, realizing that my piece of plastic junk wouldn’t automatically deliver the kind of pictures Mother and Dad made, even if I wished real hard (and, trust me, I tried). I learned, in short, just how much I had to learn, that good images had to be, in a very real way, earned. After the disappointing revelation that I couldn’t easily make what I saw in my mind come real through the work of my hands, my mistakes gradually became my teachers instead of my torturers. The Pony gave me the hunger to make that happen. And, in time, the pictures came.
I’ve purchased a lot of old cameras just to run a roll of film through them to see what happens, but the near total disappearance of even expired 828 stock has kept me from shooting with my own parents’ chosen kit. But maybe I don’t have to: maybe I have already pulled as much delight out of it as I ever can. I see them, young and smiling, filled with dreams and desires, every time I pass the camera on my den shelves. That’s a pretty premium image all by itself. Don’t know if I can ever top it.
(F)UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
World in my pocket: a typical “tiny planet” app for making landscapes into well-rounded domains.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTO-PROCESSING APPS HAVE PROLIFERATED WITH INCREDIBLE SPEED over the last ten years, making it possible for even the casual snapper to achieve nearly any look, either on the cheap or absolutely free. It’s created a miraculous marketplace. Impulse is immediately entertained, and the old risk and costs of trial-and-error attempts at certain effects are all gone. Trying something fresh costs us little but patience and time.
Fun thing is, even though lots of such apps are only designed do one thing really well, some are actually little trojan horses of alternate effects if you only, well, use them “wrong”, or at least counter-intuitively. For example, an app that’s made primarily to blend together double-exposures could also act as a cheap, fast HDR generator, with the combining of light and dark copies of the same image resulting in a composite that has a wide range of light-to-dark dynamics. It’s just a matter of ignoring the rather boring thing the app was designed for, or, if you like, using a kitchen knife as a screwdriver.
Some of my favorite one-trick-pony apps, ones that I would normally play with once and then forget, are the so-called “tiny planet” converters that take a horizontal landscape and make it look as if it were rolled up into a small separate world (see top) in which skyscrapers and trees jut out into empty space like something out of The Little Prince. It’s was a cool trick ten years ago, but, since everyone has now pounded what used to be a unique illusion into a single-stroke cliche, it becomes boring rather quickly. However, most of the tiny planet apps have adjustment controls that can actually take the “ball” and turn it inside out or even fold it over on itself. You just do the effect “wrong”, and go from there. And so, you’d start with something like this:
And use the orientation controls in the app to churn and twist it, until you get this..
The reason this becomes fun again is because it’s damn near uncontrollable. That is, the adjustments are so clumsy and crude that it’s hard to fine-tune them, meaning that it’s damned difficult to get anything like the same result more than once in a row. As a consequence you wind up producing one happy, unrepeatable accident after another…and that, actually, renders the thing perversely interesting to me. In fact, I’m now so into fun-intended consequences with apps that, when someone asks me about a new one, my first question is, “how do the pictures look when you totally screw it up?” Turns out, going nowhere in particular at warp speed is pretty trippy.
NOT QUITE A MEMORY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MY WIFE’S MOTHER WAS NOT MUCH FOR COLLECTING, but, over the years, she did lay aside a rather large bag of silver dollar coins dating from the late 1800’s through the post-WWI era. Like many of us, I suppose she thought they would inevitably increase in value, sort of like a low-interest passbook account. The jury’s still out on that, although I really doubt if Marian and I are sitting on the motherlode: the real value in the coins lies in their ability to conjure other times.
Occasionally, the coins are trotted out and sniffed over, then put back under wraps, but, at their most recent airing, I decided to do some macro work with them, employing a Lensbaby Velvet 56 lens (which magnifies nearly to 1 to 1). Like most Lensbaby optics, the 56 is designed to create a “look” that borrows more from art than reality, delivering a warm, glowing haze layer atop a focused underlying image. Words like “glamour” or “dreamy” are used to describe the effect, conjuring visions of Hollywood starlets posing for their studio head shots.
Most of the coins showed no human face at all, just a profile of Lady Liberty, but one from the U.K. featured a visage that was both real and fantasy, depending upon whom you asked: a portrait of a decidedly young Elizabeth II from the 1950’s, an artist’s idealization that happens on all official money, sanding the rough edges and more mortal flaws from various sovereigns both good and evil, transforming them into a vision of the leaders we wish we had. Elizabeth’s 70-year reign is a classic example of how the idea of something substantial, or lasting, is as powerful as actually being substantial or lasting. Come to think of it, that sounds like the very stuff of making photographs.
What could be less “real” or “representational” than using a lens to make an abstraction of something that was an abstraction to begin with? And yet, what could be more purely photographic? In my choice of lens, alone, I’ve made a series of interpretive choices… deciding that I would present this object in this distinct fashion, that its flaws and features alike would be filtered through something that would assign a different value to them. Pictures are made of things as we wish to see them, not as they are, since that kind of reality is beyond the power of any device. If we let ourselves, we truly work without limits or expectations.
It’s almost as great an entitlement as being Queen….
THE RISING, COMPLETED
By MICHAEL PERKINS
September 11, 2022
TWENTY-ONE YEARS. The life of a legally arrived adult. The space of a generation. How much time has passed since the horror of 9/11, and yet how immediate remains its emotional resonance. Photographers the world over, then and now, have tried to capture the surreal universal gasp of shock that unfurled in those few minutes on 9/11/01. And now, today, as the wound has become the scar and the flash has morphed into a flashback, an entirely reborn Lower Manhattan both recalls the history and serves, ironically, to obliterate it. For those who make images, the present era is a fraught one.
The first pictures, of course, were of the burning, the dying, the national open grave. The second wave of images was of the remains of people and buildings being literally trucked away, of a starched, scraped plain that promised a a repurposing. Coming soon on this site. Flags and markers and makeshift memorials, as holy as they were to many, were soon ushered offstage, as New York, the city that knows more about staging revivals than any other, prepared for a new production. As a frequent visitor to New York over the past fifteen years, I was present at many of the stages of the set design.
Lights, action, rebirth.
I have tried to have it both ways with the pictures I have made in the area, with both respectful homages to the sacramentals within the September 11th museum and the memorial pools, and the explosion of creative energy that mushroomed into the new WTC plaza. It’s been a high-wire act, artistically and emotionally, but I feel an urge now, to move my lens almost exclusively to The Next Act, since it now exists not merely as a yearning for a return to normalcy, but as a defiant fait d’accompli, another proof that New Yorkers are always about Getting On With It.
This image, with its lettered reflection of the 90 Church Street Post Office (which was itself littered with falling debris of the twin towers’ collapse), is my attempt to capture past survivors and forward strivers in the same frame, to say, yes, amen, a prayer for the dying, but also yes, hell yes, for the indomitability of America, which honors its founders best when doubters prematurely pronounce it out for the count.
We are back.
We are always back.
We are staying.
MITIGATING FACTORS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IN LEARNING HOW TO MAKE PICTURES, we progress from the general to the particular, in that we initially learn formalized rules that apply in many or most situations, and then develop our own, shorter list of more rubbery regulations that most precisely fit our own approach to creativity. We learn from rigid do’s and don’ts, “always” and “nevers” that gradually bend or dissolve in deference to our fully realized style.
That means that, in photography, all standards are negotiable, even disposable. Think what freedom that sentence implies. In architecture, such a thing is not possible, since a building either has support or doesn’t. In math, such leeway is nigh unto unthinkable, because the specs in a space vehicle are either in tolerance (people survive) or out (people don’t survive). However, in a visual art, things work when they work, whether they adhere to a formal technique or not.
Because of its fairly soft focus, this picture, according to some who may view it, is imperfect, flawed, or what might term a bad photograph. It had to be grabbed in a second of impulse because everything in it was perishable. Things like the approaching auto, because it was needed for scale, composition, and a sense of urgency: the storm, which was refracting the dying sunlight of a late afternoon in amazing, but fleeting contrast: even my car, since I was shooting out my driver’s side window and would soon have to move on to avoid snarling traffic. It is not a precise picture, but instead it is an image of an opportunity. I might, with an additional second or two, have guaranteed the sharpness that, for some, disqualifies this shot, but I was shooting one-handed, and on full manual, and the oh-what-the-hell rule trumped everything else.
But for me, everything else except the lack of sharpness works powerfully enough to “sell” the picture, to convey what I felt when snapping it. Crispness might have been an additional plus for the final image, but I will never know. I do know how rotten I would have felt if I hadn’t had a go at it. Emotions can often carry a photograph where mere technical precision can never reach, and you’ll know when the time is right to choose one or the other.
I GOT THEM ‘NEW TOYS BLUES’ AGAIN, MAMA
By MICHAEL PERKINS
All the odds are in my favorSomething’s bound to beginIt’s gotta happen, happen sometimeMaybe this timeMaybe this time, I’ll win
EVERY PHOTOGRAPHER CAN IDENTIFY with Liza Minnelli’s hope, expressed in the musical Cabaret, that her personal losing streak is about to end. The very first time you click a shutter, you create the unbridgeable gap between what you see and what your hands and the machine can re-create, and, in our various disappointments, we theorize about what it’ll take to get us back on the path. More instruction? Travel? Mentoring with a master?
Or how about a new piece of kit?
We’ve written exhaustively about the allure of so-called G.A.S., or Gear Acquisition Syndrome, the intoxicating belief that our very next camera or lens will turn the trick on our fortunes, somehow transforming us into the master photog we were born to be. The new toys’ attributes waft out of the brochure like the perfumes of a thousand Arabian dancing girls, curling around our hopes, blinding us with the seductive aroma of “next time”. And, while new gear often can allow us to execute things better from a technical standpoint, we are destined, in most cases, to settle into a kind of post-purchase melancholy when we realize that, after the Christmas-morning glow burns off, we just have one more piece of equipment to lug around with no ironclad guarantee of wholesale improvement. And them New Toys Blues are hard to shake, baby. Especially once the credit card statement posts.
Of course, we need to forgive ourselves if we occasionally lapse into the habit of seeing better picture-making as somehow coming at us from outside ourselves. After all, we must invest our money and trust in external devices to a degree. However, on our best days, we realize, at least for a while, that “the odds”, as the song goes, are already in our favor. Our best images still flow from us, not to us.
AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
OVER THE YEARS, I HAVE HAD MORE THAN A FEW ISSUES with the term street photography. I get to the point where I either think I know what I mean by it, and then there are times when I think I know what others mean by it. People other than me seem to think it describes human activity as it’s displayed and captured outdoors…little dramas recorded as folks gather in public places, near restaurants and bars, sitting on a bench, running for a cab. For me, the term should also apply to streets that are utterly devoid of human traffic, since even in “empty” spaces the mark or influence of people is still richly encoded into the works: in the buildings and businesses they build, in how they prioritize color or texture, in what they choose to preserve or destroy. In other words, people-influenced life without people actually moving through it.
Anything that happens on the street, regardless of whether people are seen, is “street photography”.
We understand this view whether we think we do or not. Consider the particular phenomenon of public art, either the institutional, statue-in-the-park kind or the sprayed-out-of-a-paint-can type. Chances are that when we behold the artist’s testimony…on walls, subways, sidewalks…the actual artist is nowhere nearby. Street photography occurs with or without people in the pictures, since they can be detected whether they inhabit the scene in physical form or not. Public art is just one way this happens.
It’s manifested in many ways: how a small business decides to dress its windows: the mystery of how the mottos or decorative touches on an old bank came to be: the crazy quilt of competing architectural eras within the same block…all these signs and more signal human activity no less than does a highway map or an electrical circuit. The skewed take on the Mona Lisa, seen above and painted on the side of a building in midtown Columbus, Ohio, implies the grins that will no doubt grace the faces of the many who walk past the lady’s mystic smile on their way out of the parking lot that frames her. What could be more human, more “street” than that?
Terms, in photography or any other pastime, are useful parameters for labeling and identifying major areas one from another. When they crowd the artist into corrals, however, they stop helping and start hindering. Street photography is easy to define. It’s anything that happens on the street.
TRUTH VERSUS REALITY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ORSON WELLES ONCE SAID OF JAMES CAGNEY that, while he was not a “realistic” actor per se, there had never been a single frame of film shot of him that was untrue. Something in the Yankee Doodle Dandy’s presence on screen was both more and less than real, and so, as a result, it registered with audiences as authentic, as if it ought to be true. Oddly, in making this observation, Welles may as well have been talking about two competing visions of photography, two disparate camps that choose either “truth” or “reality” in almost everything they create.
Many of us learn a formal definition of words like sharpness, tone, contrast, color, and many more of us learn that a certain combination of these elements equals a picture that is “like life”. This comes from the earliest years of photographic instruction, in which raw amateurs, who were necessarily outcome-oriented (i.e., wanting a return on their investment in gear and film) were given certain arbitrary rules for the making of a so-called “good” picture. But “good”, or “real”, or “authentic” according to whom? After reading all the “how-to” booklets, we have to spend the rest of our lives figuring out the answer to those questions.
In comparing these two renderings of a single landscape shot, what, in your mind, qualifies (or disqualifies) one version over the other in terms of its post-processing? Which reflects what I saw in the moment versus what I later re-sculpted in terms of tonal range, intensity, color? Which picture came first? (Spoiler: I’m not telling). Is one “realer”, or more naturalistic, than the other? Why or why not? And which one is, to your mind or eye, true?
More to the point, whatever your conclusion, how can it become the standard for my opinion, or his, or hers, or theirs? When we look at an image, are we actively weighing what was, at various stages, done to it, or do we merely judge the result (Spoiler Two: often we do both)? Cagney’s entire approach to acting was summarized in his advice to a beginner: “Plant your feet, look the other fellow in the eye, and tell the truth”. How that truth makes it from vision to result is anyone’s guess, and everyone’s decision. No manual, no set of rules, no formal class can teach that.
thenormaleye 