The good thing about social media is that sooner or later, you are compelled to justify or defend everything you do. The bad thing about social media is that sooner or later  you are compelled to justify or defend everything you do.

Tonight, I got a message from Anne saying simply that Maria’s fund-raising campaign for India “was cyber-begging by any other name.”  Anne, a  reliably nasty messager who claims to be a psychologist, has written me before, mostly to suggest I am not too bright. For some reason, I always remember her.

I got another message soon after from a couple complaining about my IR photographs: “we don’t want to discourage your creativity, but we don’t like the green’ish ones, or all those black and white photos, we just want color photographs of the animals and the farm.”

In the interests of my Civility campaign, I did answer Anne L, I said she should use any name she likes, it is not business of mine. I didn’t reply to the couple, I chose to spare them what I was thinking. I might have unintentionally hurt their feelings.

The response to the IR photographs have been interesting. Many people do not care for them, they prefer color photographs of the animals and the farm. Some people get irritated by any photographs that are not of the dogs or donkeys or cats. Some people love them, are fascinated by them. Others just find them strange.

Some people – thoughtful people, I appreciate their comments – do not care for the unusual representations of Infrared photography. I have very mixed feelings about IR photos myself, I haven’t quite landed yet. I love some of them, I don’t care for many.

I haven’t quite figured IR out, I’m struggling with the settings and the exposure issues of a camera that can see things I can’t see. It’s a work in progress for me. I love the way IR captures big skies.

Also this morning, I got a helpful, even inspiring message about IR photography from Karen McRitchie, a teacher of students with disabilities.  She said she found the IR photos interesting, she had no idea what they were at first. Her first thoughts, she said, were “how wondrous a gift it is to be able to see the world’s colors” in ways human beings can’t see them.

IR photography is called the photography of the unseen, the camera sees light beyond the spectrum available to people.

As someone who works with people with disabilities, the IR photos reminded her of the photos transformed to show what it is like for someone to be colorblind.

“The absence of rich colors makes me more appreciative of the colors of life,” she wrote. “Also, the photos sometimes show things we might not notice in a regular photograph.”

The IR photos, she wrote, offer a new perspective, and “perspective can be enlightening. Your photos provide a new perspective of everyday things and although the photos are unusual – it’s good to step away from comfort zones; to look at the world from a different perspective. Have a great week and thanks.”

This is the kind of thoughtful message that helps me to understand my own feelings better than I could by myself. I’d like to meet Karen, I wish I had a teacher like her.

She helped me to see what I love about IR photography, it gives me a new way to see the world, and sees things my own eyes cannot see. It is, in fact, good to step away from my comfort zones about photography and see things from a different perspective. At the same time, the absence of color is a challenge for me I love the clarity of color and also of black and white.

In a sense, as Karen suggests,  the absence of color helps me to see color more clearly than ever. Sometimes, when you are forced to imagine something rather than see it,  you see it more clearly than ever.

I take a lot of colorful photos of animals, and I love doing that, it is one of the core things that drew me to photography. I will not stop doing that. But I also want more than that for myself and my work, and people will, of course, have to make up their own minds about what they wish to see and what they wish to not see.

There are many places online to see good animal photography.

I think IR photography is a good thing to talk about, and I welcome feedback about it.  It is not easy to take a good photograph, but digital photography makes it easier than ever before, and IR photography makes it difficult. You really have to earn a good photograph.

That kind of challenge is essential to growth.

The blog is not just about cute animals and pretty landscapes, it never was and never will be only that. It’s about a life, and a life comes in many different hues and shades.

Creativity is about experimentation, about mistakes just as much as successes.

I have always taken the Beavis & Butthead approach to photography: because I don’t know what i am supposed to think, I am free to think. We’ll see where it was, and I am grateful to Karen McRitchie for helping me see just where I am with it.