So I reached England the morning after my birthday, after having the longest birthday of my life (it lasted more than 24 hours because I crossed the international date line while it was still my birthday). Thanks for all the birthday wishes and presents! Although I'm sorry, I couldn't bring some of them with me. I simply had no space.

( London :D )
( and then Oxford )

It's not some horror scene, it's my attempt at filing my notes. 

That would constitute around half of History, half of Economics, and probably the whole of General Paper.

That is less than half my notes. Probably around 1/3.

Cool huh?

And there's even a soft toy rabbit at the top of the pic! Yx, you'll remember it as the one which I bought in York before Evensong at York Minster, and carried around with Hamley.  

Lexus (the car brand)'s slogan goes something like, "The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection". 

While I am no car enthusiast, I would venture to say that the same happens everyday for a lot of things. But in particular I'm talking about photographs for this instance.

I would really like to quote this guy, called Paul Indigo, who writes a blog here.

"The great images that have technical flaws are still great images because they are powerful and capture something special. There is nothing worse than a technically bad image which has nothing to say."

Although the above statement is slightly at risk of seeming to choose technical perfection over aesthetic quality, I think you'd get what it actually is trying to say. 

In any case, if your image wasn't at least slightly aesthetically pleasing, it'll just be passed over like the millions of other images we see everyday. Really, in this absolutely media saturated world, we probably see thousands, if not millions of different images everyday. In advertisments, mostly. Those darned things are everywhere. And if you want to consider the moving images we see as well, it definately goes past the million mark. 

But, for all that, how much do we remember or even recall seeing? At most a couple, a single-digit number of them are actually vaguely remembered. We have somehow subconsiously trained ourselves to ignore the whole deluge.

Generally speaking, aesthetics come first, technical perfection comes later. But if someone notices an aesthetically pleasing image, they'll look at the technical side too. But if your great image is so technically flawed that it skews the image itself, then that image is rendered pointless. Aesthetics and technicalities, they come hand in hand, and as much as you might want to, neither can be entirely ignored.

The main reason for this posting is to express my irritation when someone (it could be anyone, not necessarily me) presents their photograph for critique. Inadvertently, someone will say, 

"x object/ person/ line/ shadow/ speck of dust is distracting".

Now what does "distracting" mean? Often you won't actually notice that "distracting" element until after it has been pointed out, which is some serious case for irony. 

But irony aside, most of the time the offending element is minute, insignificant, and usually does not affect the photograph as a whole. 

Then why do people still say it? I don't know. Perhaps they think it sounds cool or something.

I will just end this off with a photograph of mine that pretty much has a lot of "wrong" things about it. I know about them because people have said them about it. You are welcome to add to the list too. 



The List:
1. It's too dark.
2. It's not sharp enough.
3. I shouldn't have directly flashed the flash straight at the mirror.
4. It should be a tighter crop.
5. There is no depth of field in this picture.
6. The thing on the right is distracting.

Then again, this photograph was taken before I knew what the f number stood for (i.e. my technical knowledge was still in its infancy).

Ah, ignorance is bliss.

 

Feeling a bit emo at the moment. So here's a bicycle photo, in monochrome because it I think that it reflects the mood the way I want it and the way I feel it.

 Waiting in Line outside Christchurch College, Oxford University.

Yx, I'm serious, let's go UK again. I really want to.