Practical Reasoning

My friend, X, is keen on practical reasoning.  Years ago (far in advance of most people), X realized that he did not need printed versions of digital photographs and did not need photo albums because he could port electronically into his television and conduct televised slide shows for viewing his photographs.

The rest of us eventually caught up to X and his practical photography showing.

On a more recent outing, as X and I stood sizing-up the photographic potential of a tall tree that—in my estimation—begged for a portrait camera orientation to fill the captured image, I noticed X backing away from the subject to capture the image in landscape orientation.

“Why don’t you turn the camera so you can get everything this way?” I asked X.  I held my camera out to show him.

 “I like the pictures to fill-up the screen on my television.  I don’t like the black spaces on both sides of the screen when you show pictures taken that way.”  Continuing to evaluate the tree before us, he added:  “I never take those pictures.”

While I might argue that, on occasion, a few rules of composition will suffer from refusal to turn the camera to capture subjects in portrait, I cannot find fault in the naked practicality of the reasoning supplied by my dear friend X.

X is all about filling his big screen with the photo.

Another man, an electrician I worked with, came up with a slew of practical solutions for nearly everything you might imagine.   My favorite of his practical solutions was his poisoning an eight-inch border of the grass around his house, sidewalks, and driveway so he did not require an edge trimmer.  He made a dead zone that required zero care.  Looks (and all else) be damned.

This same electrician did not invent the concept of haphazardly attaching a spring to automatically shut doors but he most certainly over-used it.  He was also famous for transforming cars into trucks.  My electrician friend enjoyed hauling things around, and in his view everything should be a truck.

On those occasions when someone suggested to my electrician friend that his solutions were either severe or outright ugly, he shrugged and muttered: “It works.”

No argument there.

Finally, I have all those (long singled or widowed) friends who, at our late stage of life, have given up on dating and love.  For this and for all of the above…I am not that practical, and perhaps from that I suffer.

--Mitchell Hegman