Lessons on life from the eye of a photographer

The initial picture of the heron.

Say what you will about the social media, but nothing in history has allowed so many people to share their ideas with so many people so effortlessly.

A post by our astronomy columnist, Vernon Whetstone, caught our eye on Facebook this week.

A former professional photographer, he recalled a seminar where the presenter offered some sage advice:

The view from a different perspective.

"If you don't like the perspective ... move."

What brought the lesson to mind was a morning walk with his wife, Janice, around a lake near their home in Colorado, when they encountered a great blue heron.

The first photo wasn't much to his liking, so, after remembering the old lesson, he took five steps to the left and snapped another one, which showed off the bird to much better advantage.

"That lesson could also be applied to life. If our perspective is lousy, perhaps we are the thing that needs a slight adjustment for a better view," he concluded.

We couldn't help adding an observation of our own about a new manifestation of the photographer's are, along with an opinion about it's popularity.

The "selfie" has entered the English lexicon, referring to a cellphone picture of one's self, companions and environs, tight cropping necessitated by the length of one's arm.

What makes selfies so popular, we conjectured, was that they concentrate on the essential and crop out what we don't need -- good advice for life as well as photography.