Natural

 I know some blip friends see an odd post from me on a Scottish related group on Facebook. Like blip it is a bit of human interest, perhaps social comment but within certain Scottish related paramaters. Earlier this week one of my uploads attracted a disproportionate (for me) amount of views and comments; generally all positive. However yesterday I discovered I had been thrown out. I was fair vexed at that. I later found I was the subject of some mistaken identity and the admin people were very kind and helpful to me and I now have a seat back at the table. Apparently there was a complaint about dog images from a person with a name sounding similar to my own, my post had dog images and that was the source of the confusion.

 
Anyway, I did glimpse (because it was immediately removed by the admin) some of what may have been going on and there is evidently notion of some people’s photos looking “unnatural”.
Can I indulge in some personal views?
Photography is an amazing medium. A single image conveys emotion, mood, weather, speed, calm, in fact it is limitless. While we as operators may try to replicate the scene we perceived at the time we need to do many unnatural things to get a view close to what the eye saw. We can recognise a face against a bright sky. A camera can only do this with over exposure which burns out the sky; not natural, or introduction of foreground flash; not natural either. A 50mm lens on a 35m camera gives a human eye field of view but we stand at a shore and look at lochs and mountains beyond, we move our head around subconsciously to take in the entire scene in our brain. The camera needs a wider (less natural) lens to accomplish the same feat as the human spectator. Yet, that same lens pointed at a human face from a couple of feet away gives an unattractive portrait. The photographer in you wants to step back a couple of yards and use a longer lens to convey the image (or crop out the centre of the WA image) we have of that face in our mind. We are now in an age of photoshop too. A few wee tweaks here and there can transform a dull image in to something you might want to print and cherish. What’s wrong with that? You can of course go SOOC (Straight out of camera) but this is hardly a purist ideal either because, whether you like it or not the jpeg you download has already been processed by the camera and different devices will process the same image very differently. For years the typical 35mm SLR owner had their stock 50mm prime lens and looked at the world in their viewfinder through a lens at F1.8. The excuse for people images appearing to have flag poles and the like emerging from their heads such was the limited DOF of field at the time the button was pushed. Range finder camera owners always used this logic to support their choice of apparatus over the trendy SLRs of the time.

Photography has never been so accessible as it is right now. Just look at the pictures people post and accept them. I would suggest the images that most of us like, while possibly looking “natural”, are full of artificial sweeteners and that’s fine by me. 

The blip is a picture of Bob and Caley having a super time in the Upper Inverroy morning snow. Apologies now, I used a flash, but just be kind to me.