By MICHAEL PERKINS
OH, IT'S YOU...
Or, more appropriately, good to see you....
It's been far too long since I've laid out the welcome mat to all the new subscribers who've signed up for updates from The Normal Eye since the last turn of the season. Please excuse my manners, which are more AWOL than non-existent. Obviously, none of this would still be limping along, eleven years on, without you.
TNE was never intended to be a one-way soapbox, or, in fact, any kind of soapbox at all. It started as sort of a diary of my own journey as a photographer, an unsure chronicle that I worried would have little or no utility to the public at large. After all, no one journey is applicable to all, and so I made no attempt to hold myself up as a general guide for technique per se, since everyone and his brother can teach the technical end of the craft far better than me. The blog thus kind of grew into an attempt at a two-person conversation, with my questions about the value of my own progress being thrown out not as an example but as a starting point for discussion. The point wasn't to write about "how I did it" so much as to try to answer the bigger question, which was why I decided to do it at all.
For me, everything starts with vision and motivation, something I've tried to convey every time I sit down to compose this humble small-town newspaper. Tech is fascinating and fun, but, when it comes to art, machines are just machines, something we will all be struggling to remember as A.I. becomes either helpmate or Frankenstein monster as regards our photography. What makes a camera valuable is the eye in back of it, and the soul back of that eye. Getting at least that one point across has remained a constant aim in these pages, and you alone must decide if it has any value for what you're also discovering about yourselves.
But back to point one; there is no Normal Eye without you, and I don't re-state that as often as I should. So thank you. For your patience, for your advice, for your passion. And for striving always to see, to see, to see. That's the entire ballgame.
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