Reflections 23rd March

Something about Depth of Field

Mar 23, 2025

I learned my photography in the old-fashioned way in the 1960s, taught by an Italian, Antonio Jaconelli, an amateur who could have made a living from it. He trusted me with a Hasselblad 500c that cost around what my father would earn in six months. Things we no longer have to pay attention to mattered - film speed, aperture, shutter speed, and focal length were all deliberate decisions that determined the quality of the generated image. There was no automation and even minor errors cost expensive film, so paying attention to detail mattered.

Making things easy carries a price. Not just in raw materials, time and unrecoverable opportunities but in knowledge, understanding, and dependency. Photography on my iPhone is easy and costs nothing. It takes care of all the details and makes producing an acceptable image easy.

I was going to write “idiot proof” instead of “easy”, but realised that the reverse is true. In making it easy, it turns us into idiots - from Greek idiōtēs "layman, person lacking professional skill”. We are given means of capturing beauty, and we use it to play Minecraft.

Antonio spent hours teaching me about depth of field; the importance of film choice, lens selection, aperture, shutter speed and perhaps most of all, timing. Capturing a moving subject against a complex background and bringing it into sharp relief was a one-shot opportunity. Pressing the shutter release was the end of a thought process and the beginning of a production process that would finish in the darkroom. In his eyes, it was not just a craft; it bordered on a religion. I am still grateful to him.

Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” –

Peter Adams

Understanding how something works and accepting the mysteries of what we do not (yet) understand changes our relationship with it. Mastery demands awe.

It feels to me as though we are in such a moment when it comes to the relationship between critical and creative thinking and the abilities of AI.

We are at an inflexion point. Individually, we must choose between the disciplines of thinking and the idiocy of automation, in much the same way as we have done with photography. It is perfectly possible to take stunning photographs with an iPhone as long as we realise that the difference between “mediocrity” and “stunning” has nothing to do with the phone and everything to do with what the person wielding it is paying attention to.

“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”

Dorothea Lange

I am an avid proponent and increasingly adept user of AI, and I am hugely impressed by its increasing ability to help me gather my thoughts and references quickly into a working space like some digital sheepdog.

There is, though, I think, a depth of field problem.

AI is a Western technology that uses Western information shaped by Western values, heuristics, and biases. It says little of the understanding of ancient wisdom other than those translated into an acceptable form for consumption by Western minds, and nothing of the deep wisdom of oral and other traditions that refuse to be turned into “data”.

It encourages us to believe that we now have a technology that has access to all there is to know, and removes the need to think critically.

It s the equivalent of regarding McDonalds, KFC and Pizza, apparently Donald Trump’s preferred diet, as fine food, and look where that’s taking us.

Just as digital photography raised the bar to make mediocrity widely acceptable when it comes to personal photography, AI may well do the same when it comes to thinking.

It’s not the technology's fault, nor is it, except in the minds of conspiracy theorists, the fault of its inventors.

It’s down to us.

In particular, it’s down to our choices regarding what we consume, who we work with, and who we choose to follow. We are all meat-based processors, so the old rule applies: garbage in, garbage out.

Back to Depth of Field. Just as the depth of field we get through a lens decreases the wider the aperture we use, the less our understanding becomes the more information we take in. The more information we take in, the more we rely on technology to process it, creating an ever-increasing dependency and resultant fragility.

Today, in conditions of radical uncertainty and geopolitical tension, our depth of field is not only shallow, it is focused in the wrong place. We are witnessing reflex reactions to change, as creaking companies with obsolete models thrash around for relevance, and we watch the tragedy of a great country convincing itself it is one no longer and needs to fix it by a week on Thursday through economic brutality.

AI is a hugely impressive and valuable tool, but only a partial solution. AI will do the grunt work of making better use of what we already know, but it will not do the creative work that evolution does.

AI seems likely to get us to a more efficient version of what we already have, and that’s not enough.

The relentless search for efficiency and productivity, and its collision with the attitudes of those now entering and shaping work has led to a clash of cultures, making work for many, at every level, miserable.

Growth has its genesis in Creativity, which in turn is fuelled by play.

Meanwhile, process, like some workplace Grinch, has stolen the play that matters. Those of you with children and grandchildren will recognise the difference between “free play” - that feeds off curiosity, joy, laughter, free association with people and ideas leading to discovery without pressure, and “structured play” that is designed with an end in mind, normally some form of learning goal, and where somebody is awarding points.

We are focusing in the wrong place: on short-term performance that ends in mental, physical and spiritual exhaustion rather than relationships that will capture and harness the energy and opportunities emerging from the changes organisations are resisting.

This means that for us, as individuals, the organisations we work for are probably not the place to look for opportunities. Under pressure, these organisations are looking for ideas that fit the current operating model rather than rethinking the models they use (because those in charge of them understand them, and dislike what they do not). “Play” in these organisations is structured, designed by consultants, supervised by HR, and rarely fun.

As the world changes, what we need is more like “free play”—space to wander for a while outside the walls, looking for our boundaries beyond the walls.

Boundaries are about our values; Walls are about the interests of others.

“Walls look like order; but more often than not a wall stands at the precise fulcrum of an imbalance in society. Most walls are only necessary as a means of defending the resources of those that have them from those that lack them. In this way, though they present themselves as mechanisms of security, they are in fact tools of oppression.”
Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

Wandering outside the walls in search of our boundaries cannot be done at scale. It needs us to quiet the noise of social media and febrile politics and instead spend time in the company of others. In places where we can make decisions that affect our lives, and of those we care for, in small communities of practice, where we can do the work of converting our fears about what is happening to excitement about what might.

“Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.”
Alfred Hitchcock

As the world changes, it opens up all manner of possibilities. Capabilities being opened up by technology for individuals will change our relationship with work in many unexpected ways.

Exploring that will be a matter for future posts.

For those interested, we are opening up to new participants the Mighty Network we set up earlier in the year for those who want to explore the spaces outside the walls together.
Starting in April, in addition to the ongoing dialogue on the platform, there will be weekly conversations on Zoom as we explore ideas of creating independent small groups connected by common interest in the space outside the walls. Numbers are limited as we move from twenty members to a cap of fifty.

If you’d like to join, drop me a line.