All the gear with no idea

Like everyone else on social media I get bombarded by images the algorithm fairies presume I will like. Pictures of beautiful people doing amazing things in exotic places, adrenalin junkies leaping vast chasms on mountain bikes and silhouetted eagles rising majestically over a golden sunburst. I made up that last one, but you get the point. They seem sooo amazing and, dare I say it, unreal. Perhaps they are. There is of course some push back too. I follow someone on Instagram who only posts pictures of bowls of ramen and there is a Facebook group for ‘crap bird photography’ which is hilarious. But these are self-aware outliers and satirists.

For the most part, content creators and influencers confuse the consumption of beauty with the production of beauty. On a more mundane level, we do too. What a beautiful photo we say, perhaps out of politeness, when we really mean what a beautiful mountain / bird / sunset / baby [delete as appropriate]. There’s nothing wrong with that, but simply photographing a beautiful thing does not make it a beautiful photo even if using a fancy camera. I know because I have tried. Many times.

My hope was that my fancy new camera would help me take beautiful photos but, more often than not, all it did was amplify my limitations. There’s a lot to learn about framing, bokeh and the so called ‘exposure triangle’ etc which is difficult to remember at my age particularly when freezing cold in a field with changing light and moving subjects.

A couple of weeks ago I was in such a spot, nowhere special, a wetland hide I often visit and I thought I would try to immortalise the landscape with the help of my Sony A7iv. I took the photo but noticed the settings were all wrong. ISO way too high, aperture way too narrow and I’m not even sure what the shutter was doing. Impatient as ever, I quickly reverted to ‘auto settings’ which pretty much guarantee decent images every time. I often do this to compare my photo with the camera’s AI assisted photo and, being completely honest, the latter is usually much better. When I downloaded the images, however, I couldn’t quite believe the outcome. Seurat? Monet? Daz??? A beautiful impressionistic landscape, like nothing I have ever achieved or perhaps even seen before. Common birds in a common place yet something so mundane to me now appeared beautiful - simply by not following generic algorithms.

Daz 1 Sony 0

All that said, I’m still not sure how I did it and I couldn’t replicate it if I tried a thousand times, but even a bad footballer can on occasion score a great goal and, clearly, a bad photographer can on occasion take a beautiful photo. A fluke does not entail greatness, but it does feel great. It also looks great hanging in the living room next to my other flukes / masterpieces [delete as appropriate].

Anyway, for the sake of transparency, here's the algorithm fairy's photo taken from the hide. You be the judge.