A skewed sense of perspective

A skewed sense of perspective

The Skew tool in Photoshop is one of my favourites… It allows me to straighten wayward verticals and horizontals, and the effect on human shapes is all but unnoticeable. But sometimes one’s sense of perspective is dulled by being in one’s own little well. Silo culture, it was called when I was still at work… Nowadays, the echo chamber is a similar thing, though possibly that’s more intentional – if you showed people the other siloes they usually understood they needed to take account of different perspectives.



Anyway… We’re here in a little EPZ silo, and some of us have other existences in other siloes. Work, church, clubs and so on all provide other perspectives, but I tend to avoid social media: I find them random, confusing, and hard to navigate, although I’m told that they’re excellent for publicising businesses and many other things. I have an Instagram account, but I don’t use it often, and I’m not sure of my username.
One of the plainer-speaking models I know made me aware of the yawning gulf between our worlds when I told her how well an image of her was doing on this site – plenty of votes, by my standards, and a few awards. She pointed out how many THOUSAND loves she’d had for the same image on IG. What to make of that?



On the one hand, I am sure that most of Instagram’s viewers take a more casual approach to photography than members here, and will click on an image that will do very badly here, especially from a model someone is ‘following’ – so clickage will be higher. On the other hand, the respect of one’s peers is a more solid thing than a thousand click-and-forget votes. (Mind you, I’ve seen some really poor shots get votes and even awards here at EPZ – I apologise for the shiver that has sent down the spines of sensitive readers who know EXACTLY what I mean!)



Some time ago, I took a rather poor picture of a robin in our sun room ((there’s nowhere to attach one to our house, so it’s a freestanding building part-way down the garden). I posted it on here, and also on a Certain Social Media site, with suitable disclaimers in both places. I know it’s a poor shot compared with expert birders’ output. It’s special for me (and Mrs D) because it’s a bird inside our space – (and Mrs D asked me for a print!)

I was roundly told off by a friend for talking my own picture down: she was judging by snapshot standards, not serious photographer ones. Maybe – in that context – it’s fair enough between friends, but I am quite a serious sort of picture-taker, and I differentiate between my uncontemplated family snaps and the pictures that I construct carefully.



Some of this is about the relative size of fish and ponds… You can be the best photographer in a club, and find that your pictures fall flat everywhere else, including this website. And you may find that an image garnering votes and awards here isn’t any sort of contender in other contexts (been there, done that). But with this, it’s possible to sort out a kind of ranking between different arenas, and that’s not entirely my point.

My intention is to suggest that there may be genuinely alternative standards operating in other spheres of interest – and that a narrow view of what constitutes good may hinder your appreciation of images (and other things, too). In turn, this can upset our appreciation of people – and that is a major problem.