Making Do

FTLComm - Tisdale - Monday, September 3, 2001

So much of the time we are faced with all or nothing kinds of decisions and it is unfortunate that we do not use a little more creativity and seek out alternatives that offer us more choices. We usually think about photography in terms of enough light or not enough light and disregard the gray areas, those times when maybe it is worth considering. These images were all captured at twillight that short period of neither dark nor daylight, perhaps the best time of the day.

The Canadian mystique is that our culture, our very country was based on compromise, not a win lose situation but something in which both sides give a little to get a solution. Andrew spends so much of his time considering is this image, this scene, this combination of sight and sound good enough and for him it is difficult. Every perfectionist strives for things to be "just right" but in a real world that attitude might produce a great work but it will also produce little work. So Andrew has come up with a process he calls "settling" with settling you consider what would be the best that could be done, you look at what you have to work with and you make a decision about what will get closest to the ideal and still be aesthetically acceptable. My mother always referred to this process as "making do" only she, having grown up in the thirties, understood that often you had to go a long ways to find what was acceptable to get something that would "suffice," achieve an acceptable level while still being capable of affording that something special. When the price of dairy products sky-rocketed in the early fifties I remember she came up with a whole range of things that would help us "make do" with the money we had to live on and still have treats and the special elements that would make up a meal. Ice-cream, one of her favourites was replaced with a low cost product that she would whip up called "junket" and she would make fabulous pudding called "snow pudding" which was the clever use of egg whites. Making do, turned out often to be better that what it was replacing and though the examples I have used have been food, my memories of my childhood are filled with compromises and replacement things, or activities, that gave us all a boost in life, but helped us do it within our means. Compromise does not mean giving up and giving in, it means instead that we negotiate a settlement, something we can make do with. You don't need perfect lighting to get a great picture, in fact a truly inspiring image like the grainy glimpse of the moon rising over the darkened town is much better than perfect, it is taking the circumstances and turning them to advantage, it is indeed, making do.