HARD LEFT, HARD RIGHT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THERE ARE YEARS WHEN ONE’S PHOTOGRAPHIC WORK displays an obvious path, a palpable pattern of interest that informs most of his/her output. A year of landscapes: a year of macro studies: a year of intimate portraits; and so forth, making it easy to refer to a set twelve-month period as “my beach year” or “my pensive period”, etc.
Looking back at 2025 (which, for those who read this in the future, ends today), I seem to have been all over the place. The closest thing I can see to a clearly defined theme might be my exploration of exposure extremes, a whole bunch of experiments with both boosted and minimal lighting that seem to be largely of the “I wonder what happens when I do this” school of thought. Not career-defining, I admit, but throughout ’26 I seem to have tried frame after frame of exposures that are wildly left or right of the average. The idea, as in any departure from one’s comfort zone, is to maintain some degree of control, as well as having the choice of high or low key justify itself in the resulting image. And, of course, being me, I will, on occasion, also try something counter-intuitive.
For example, a beach is usually a place where you’re looking to shed light, since there is such a torrent of it most of the time. Instinct says to stop down the aperture, quicken the shutter speed, etc. However, I can’t help wondering if I can create a painterly or minimalist effect by going the other way and flooding the frame with surplus light. Counter that with the image I took inside a dark tomb of a theatre during a youth concert. Shooting from over 400 feet away with my particular zoom, I couldn’t open any wider than f/6.3, but I certainly could have created a so-called “normal” exposure simply by cranking the ISO to around 6400, albeit with a little noise. Instead, I dialed in ISO 3200, giving the camera the bare minimum of light needed to make the shot. What was I looking for? A warmer, more intimate aspect? Who knows? The search, the uncertainty, was the objective, even more than the final picture. Again, some photos need to be about what happens when I do this?
If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten. Simple, really, and yet we will, against our best interests, bake in habits and rely on their predictability. This year, at least with available light, I decided to spend a bit more time rolling the dice. What I do with what I learned….well, that’s another year.
UP FROM DARKNESS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
(AS YOU READ THIS, I, along with most inwardly inclined photographers, am spending the final days of the present calendar year trying to make some sense of whatever images I’ve attempted over the past twelve months. But I’m only partly interested in compiling so-called “best of” lists, since it’s really up to other eyes to decide whether any one group of my pictures can collectively be called successful. Simply, I can’t really judge how well I’ve done. Not alone, anyway.)
What I try to do instead is to determine if pictures from a given year arced or tended in a particular direction. One thing I have noticed about my work is that it seems to fall, generally, into subject years and light years……groups of shots that are either centered on what I shoot or the conditions under which I do so. 2018 seemed far and away to be about making compositions of light rather than capturing locales.
Going For The One, 2018
In more than a few photographs over the past year, I almost seemed to be dragging brighter surfaces out of solid darkness…..but only just enough to make a few details register, leaving significant portions of the finished image lingering in shadow….deliberately under-defined. I have always liked this chiaroscuro, or “Rembrandt” light effect, but this year, I seemed to be aggressively embracing it.
The shot seen here, then, is not meant to explain the building I was shooting, but to reduce it to a pure instance of color, light and design. In a different situation, the picture might have been more reportorial, but in this case, the arrangement of line and pattern was the entire goal of the photo. So, at the end of 2018, no photographic “greatest hits” list for me, just a trend line showing that my curiosity is tracking in a certain measurable direction. Photography is just as much about attempts as it is about achievements. At different junctures, we value one over the other.
thenormaleye 