Photography - eyes most important for a good photo?

Looking for things to photograph led me to my patio. Unfortunately, this is nothing more than a writer rambling - no vision as to what the photo should look like. I once started reading one of Ansel Adam's books on photography (my God, my memory is so rotten I don't even remember the name of the book) and one thing that did stick was his philosophy of photography. Photography is an expression of art - a photographer knows what s/he wants the photo to convey. However, this takes years of study and practice. Much as I would like to practice this, I often draw a blank as to what I'd like a photo to say. Sometimes I do know what I'd like a photo to look like, but struggle to achieve the effect. This despite owning a fancy SLR camera and a fancy lens/es.

Photography is a fascinating art. It requires artistic imagination and technical knowledge of optics and the interplay of light with the subject. When S gifted me my SLR camera, I spent some time reading about apertures, shutter speeds, ISO, depth-of-field and what have you. During my quest for knowledge, I came across Ken Rockwell's website on photography that put my motives to shame. Ken Rockwell contends that to take good photos one need not have a fancy camera. What is required is artistic vision and good light. One can take good photos with a point-and-shoot just as well as with a fancy-shmancy SLR camera. Imagine my chagrin reading this just after my good husband had invested about $1500 on state-of-the-art camera and lens
technology (OK it's not state-of-the-art but after you spend this kind of money on a camera, you need to use your imagination to rationalize the purchase). I could virtually hear Mr. Rockwell laughing at me - you pathetic scientists and engineers - all you know to do is buy toys based upon useless technical data. I bet you analyzed the MTF curves of the lens, lost nights of sleep on deciding whether to get a camera with a CCD or CMOS sensor, contemplated getting a Ph. D. in optics ... Let me tell you something, some of the photos I took were straight out of a cell phone. If you do have a camera (like an SLR) you seldom need to go beyond the auto setting to get a great photo. All you need is a vision and patience to wait for the good light". (Mr. Rockwell has taken some fabulous photos and specializes in landscapes, if I dare say anything about his work).

So I spent a few weeks agonizing over my foolishness of insisting on needing an SLR camera to get any more fun out of my hobby. All my pride in shooting photos which were not fully saturated or clipped (er, overexposed or underexposed if I may use the photography jargon) using manual settings for aperture and shutter speeds vanished. Finally I decided that since I do have a fancy camera, I had better use it - which have led me to these experiments, and husband to exasperation for his folly of buying me a toy that brings out OCD traits in me.

"Use your imagination"

Chinnu likes to say "use your imagination". This is something she's picked up from Barney and also apparently hears in school. It's amazing how imaginative kids are and how unimaginative adults become. I am a prime example. When I gave her the puppy to color, I could not tear away myself from telling her to color the dog in one color. "Let's make him all red like Clifford" I tried to coax her. "or brown, like a real dog". But if my chinnu has inherited one thing from her parents, it's stubbornness. Notice the s in the parents - so she has twice as much of this quality as I do. "Why don't you just let her do what she wants?" S barked at me in irritation. Now, does he understand how much I love to color myself? Not a bit. I actually make trips to Michael's with the sole purpose of buying Fuzzy Posters that I totally enjoy coloring. Ever since I have no time for more "serious" art, this is what I do. So Imagine my pain when I start to see my beautiful uncolored puppy with so much potential, sprouting red ears and a blue forehead. At this point, I tear myself away from my offspring and decide to not look at the thing at all until it's finished ("maybe she'll have a pleasant surprise for me after all"). It so happened that Chinnu had 3 days off from school and spent those days with her grandparents. I sent the puppy along and asked her to work on it. One evening, it came back fully done and I was proud of my little bundle of joy. Despite knowing a real dog is not any of these colors (other than Clifford), she came up with this. Not only that, the flowers are all in monochrome (which, other than fine details, they usually are). "Well", I thought sadly to myself, "I would never have had the imagination to create something so unreal".

Happy Mother's Day

Roses
Originally uploaded by sgopalak_28

Man or woman?

NPR did a two day story on children and adolescents who identified themselves with belonging to the opposite sex from what they were born with. I had never heard of such a phenomenon before and my first reaction was "come on, you can't be serious". I am no pundit in child psychology, or any psychology for that matter and hence found the concept of boys under the age of five showing strong signs of wanting to be a girl (trans gender, as I learned) rather bewildering.

The story on day one was about two boys who showed "symptoms" of wanting to be girls from the age of two. These "symptoms" included playing exclusively with "girl" toys (dolls instead of trucks), obsessing about the color pink (and other "girl" colors such as lavender), socializing exclusively with girls, wanting to be dressed as a girl etc. Once this behavior became very obvious to the parents, they (the kids) were taken for therapy to two different doctors that were of opposite schools of thought.

The parents of child A were very accepting of their son become their daughter - they were convinced that this was necessary because being a girl and being treated like one was what made A happy, and brought out the life in "her". They were convinced that A was a girl trapped in a boy's body and this was the essence of A. The child's doctor advised the parents that this was in the best interest of the child.

The parents of child B on the other hand, were counseled by their son's doctor that the best approach was to immediately stop encouraging behavior that would result in more gender confusion - i.e. remove all girl toys, no pink, actively encourage socializing with boys. B was traumatized by this, but he did make a few friends who were boys, cooperated in being separated from his toys. At one point, his mother said that B's biggest weakness was pink - whenever he saw pink he would cover his eyes because he could not resist pink.

A's doctor thinks B's doctor's approach is inhuman. B's doctor's justification? He contends that as B grew older, his psychological gender would clash with what the hormones would do. This could make him a social outcast, prevent him from having a relationship with neither a male nor female. Moreover, children often change their minds on who they are - i.e. as B grew up, there was a possibility that he might be comfortable being a boy. Very interesting debate ...

However, it was interesting to note that these stories were all about boys that wanted to be girls, not vice versa. Hmmm... Is transgender-ness like sexual orientation - natural rather than cultivated, if unintentionally? The metric of measuring transgenderness seemed to be playing with "girl" toys, liking "girl" things - which are defined by society. What do kids know about gender? Which brings us to the question - what makes a woman .woman and a man, man? Apparently anatomy has little to do with it.