on all things blurry.

In reading Gerry Badger's 'The Genius of Photography', I came across a beautiful photograph of a couple in a rowboat, picking waterlilies in a lake among the reeds. The photograph was taken by Peter Henry Emerson in 1886. Something about that photograph's softness made me pause longer than I normally do. If you have a spare moment, you should peruse some of Emerson's images of rural idyl. 

Anyway, Badger recounts Emerson's attempts to selectively focus the frame on a specific part of the image, rather than on the whole thing. Emerson, much like modern cognitive psychologists, believed that the human eye does not see everything in sharp focus. Or rather, modern cognitive psychology might tell us that we selective attend to only parts of the whole. This is why we are so 'good' at missing details in a frame: we cannot pay attention to it all at once. 

In the end, Badger continues, Emerson's attempt at selective focus was "just another kind of photograph to please those who believed the sharper the image the less artistic it was."

This early school of thought - that blur and softness are more 'artistic' than sharper images - has persisted and is also seen today. I see examples of this when I peruse 500px galleries for 'fine art', for instance. Or look at contemporary fine art wedding photography.

Resolve for 2017: to find an answer to the question - when is blur too much?

And an aside unrelated to blur, but related to grass-cutting: Peter Henry Emerson apparently once said, ‘No machine will be invented which will do the work as well as the scythe.’

Now, I'm glad he was wrong because - despite our best efforts and the purchase of two artisanal scythes with Swiss blades of the highest quality, plus three grazing goats, upon moving to our homestead - we could not have made even a dent in the mowing without our hand-me-down ride-on mower. And still it takes us hours to get the job done.