Things are not as they may seem.

Ann and I have been dying to get out photographing, but Portugal has just let us know we’ll need to wait another few weeks before that might be possible.  So in the meantime, we’ve turned our eyes to subjects on our daily walks and I finally found one that was worth pulling out the camera for.  Join us to find out what thoughts it brought to mind.

Folks used to say that photographs never lie.  In some ways that’s true, they depict what they depict; it just may not be what you believe it depicts.  But in this age of photoshop, it’s a lot easier for folks to make an image that combines elements from two or more images and that depicts a scene that was never really there.  Or to change what is there (I’m still hoping for the photoshop “hair” slider to come to real life).  But the fact is the adding of things not there in photographs is not such a recent thing.  In the early days of photography, films didn’t record blues (I think it was blues) so usually skies just looked blank, even when there were clouds.  Some early photographers would use filters to make an image of clouds, that they would then superimpose on prints made from other glass plates.  Call it the 1800’s version of photoshop. But I digress….  The point is, these days you have to trust that the photographer is telling the truth (whatever “truth” is and, again, ignoring the fact that photographers have their own opinions and the photographic process invariably must deviate from reality), or perhaps better put, is at least being somewhat truthful in what is being depicted.  Hopefully, I fall into that camp.  

Then again, as we study photographers and their comments on photographic image making, we’re being constantly told to “eliminate everything that is not essential to the photograph”, “remove all distractions” or “include only what is necessary to tell the story.”  Therein lies the dilemma that faced me the other morning.

There’s this old house we pass by on one of our walking routes that we keep stopping to look at.  Like too many houses here, it’s fallen into disrepair.  But like so many of them, it has a lot of character. This one has a lovely upper floor balcony with dense vines growing up the banisters and walls.  And it has a cute little weather vane.

But as the title suggests, things are not as they may seem.  

You see, the photograph above is a pretty tight crop of an image that was taken with the telephoto end of my zoom lens.  When I zoomed out, well, you can see where the house is located.  

Yeah, that’s a toy store off to the left (“lego, Barbie, . . .) that’s in a large office/retail building.  Off to the right is an apartment building.  The above image is taken from the same position as the first one.

The reality is that the property is still a lovely property.  Taken from another part of the lovely vine covered wall along this stretch of the walk, you can see the garden that’s still in use and the vines that want to cover everything.  

So the house isn’t in some bucolic setting.  That doesn’t stop us from enjoying it on our walks.  

And it’s a reminder of the advantage of just looking at things - the eye and the mind have a wonderful way of isolating things in a way that the camera cannot.  That, in part, is why photography can be so hard.