Resistant to Change - and Episode 22 of Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres

For a species that owes it's survival, evolution, and ability to conquer and occupy every corner of the world to our ability to adapt, we humans can be remarkably resistant to change.

Forget global pandemics, the rise of fascism, and the wholesale destruction of the planet – the new layout of Facebook seems to trump them all. 

Change: we really don't seem to like it very much.

I guess sometimes, though, it's the little things can act as the trigger for all the emotions we've been desperately trying to ignore, because the big picture is, well, just too big.

In the past few weeks, it's not only Facebook that have made changes in the apps I use. 

Camera Raw – a part of Photoshop I've been using for many years – recently decided to alter it's layout and each time I go to make a particular alteration to an image I have to hunt to find the button or slider that is no longer where I expected it to be.

And for those who use Google's Blogger as their primary platform for blogging, they too have changed their interface and until I've adapted to it, everything will take longer and therefore be more irritating.

There comes a point where we just want to scream.

It's the sense of a lack of control.

We just want to get on with our lives, but other forces, bigger forces, forces that could squash us like an insect – political, environmental, biological - get in the way.

We are so helpless in the face of these huge things that, mostly, we can only get by by pretty much ignoring it all.

Keep calm and carry on.

But the small things, the ones that really shouldn't make any difference – like a new layout Facebook, someone jumping the queue, or getting a spam phone call from a marketing company – these are the things that tip us over the edge.

These are the things where we feel we ought to have control, but still don't.

They might be trivial, “first world problems”, but they remind us just how vulnerable we are.

I remember when my mother went for an operation to remove a small cyst in her ear. As they started to cut it out they discovered she had cancer and had to cut much deeper. When she came to, she was missing the entire ear and half her face was paralysed.

But it was when she went to read a book and suddenly discovered her glasses wouldn't stay on her head because there wasn't an ear for them to hook over, that she had a bit of a meltdown.

What this has to do with last night's podcast, I'm not entirely sure.

Mind you, few of my weekly blogs seem that closely related to the podcasts.

I think I mentioned the changes to Camera Raw during the episode at one point, and it seemed to tie in with the new changes to Facebook. It felt like something I could blog about.

But sometimes it seems like I don't even have complete control over what I'm going to write...

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0:00 - What's coming up
2:10 - Introduction to the "Dr Megaphone" photo shoot
12:50 - Creating an old glass-plate photo effect
24:10 - Critique of images submitted to the Facebook Group, "Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres"
48:50 - how the angle of the camera affects a portrait
1:15:45 - Coming up next week

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