Pedantry

Pedantry

I’ve been reading Private Eye for around 30 years… My predecessor in a job I held for just short of ten years recommended it over all the public sector and finance magazines for finding out what’s going wrong in local government (which is why internal auditors read the press! We want to get advance warning of investigations we may get involved in…)

There’s a column in Private Eye called Pedantry Corner, reserved for readers who wish to make pedantic points: and I’ve latched onto one of these, about the distinction between ‘practise’ and ‘practice’. Not just alternative spellings, wrote Dr Julian Marsden, though I had to resort to my two-volume Oxford Dictionary, rather than my Sixties single-volume Chambers.

With a C, the word is a noun: a doctor is a partner in a GP practice, for instance. But if you want to achieve perfection, you need to practise. Now, I’m pretty sure, grammar and spelling pedant as I am, that I had missed the distinction for my sixty-something years. Sorry: I know that I use the word a lot, so I apologise to everyone in the Critique Gallery who I’ve ever advised to ‘practice as much as you can’ – I apologise.



It’s a little bit like the difference between depth of field and depth of focus. Do you know the difference?

Depth of field is the one we talk about more: it’s the range of distances from the camera that are sharp with any given lens at any given aperture. Depth of focus is the amount that the film or sensor can be moved without losing acceptable sharp focus. So ‘field’ is in the landscape in front of the lens: focus is inside the camera where you do the focussing.

Does any of this matter? Much of the time, you’ll get away with imprecision. And one day, it’ll wreck your plans and your pictures. For instance, precise focus matters in low light - the images of Princess Bee and particularly the head shot of Eviee, both in low light, one with a Lensbaby, the other with an 85mm f/1.4 lens at full aperture: not so much with the image of Rugeley power station waiting for demolition, in broad daylight. The first two rely in very limited depth of field.