Getting Perspective

Larry Eiss

The older I get the more I understand the value perspective brings to life.

One of the hobbies I really enjoy is photography, and one of the things I like best about photography is selecting something small from a much larger environment or object.  Fortunately, there are lenses for that.

When I first got my camera I had a wide-angle lens and a medium-zoom telephoto lens. The wide angle is great for capturing a panoramic image of the world, but everything in such an image appears so small that it’s impossible to see all the beauty hidden in the details. Snow-capped mountain peaks reflected in clear quiet lakes are stunning. The sense of size, scale, and dimension is preserved. The three elk grazing near that stand of cedars in the verdant valley encompassing the lake get lost in the clutter, however. Sometimes you want to see the forest.

The telephoto lens can move in close and single out a particular blossom. It can select an individual from a group, or a window on a building. Longer lenses foreshorten distances. The sense of scale is distorted so that objects at various distances from the camera appear much closer to one another that they actually are. Telephotos also minimize the area that remains in focus. 

Where a wide-angle lens might render an entire landscape scene in focus, the telephoto will focus on a specific subject, such as the face of a child, and render the foreground and background out of focus. This has the wonderful effect of making the primary subject stand out in sharp relief against the background, which often appears as nothing more than an abstract mix of colors. Sometimes you want to see each of the trees in the forest.

After I’d had the camera for a while, my wife (she’s pretty great) bought me another lens as an anniversary gift. This lens was designed specifically for close-up, or “macro,” photography. With this lens I can get even more selective. The macro lens lets me get so close that it’s easy to capture a single bee pollinating a flower, the nectar on the stamen of a lily, dew drops on a spider web on an early autumn morning, or the scene reflected in my own eye! Sometimes you want to see the needles on the tip of a single twig on a single branch on an individual pine tree in the forest.

Noteworthy photography is all about light and perspective. Perspective can make two well-lit images of the same scene look completely different. Sometimes we need to get really close and look at things in minute detail—sometimes not.

From where I sit, perspective plays an important role in life as well. Being a grandparent has given me a perspective on my life I might otherwise have missed. I've noticed that I get less flustered these days. Things that used to seem of primary importance sometimes now seem of almost no importance at all. Looking back I can hardly understand why I ever thought they warranted all the time I put into them. The perspective I've gained, from living as long as I have, tends to smooth out the highs and lows. There are fewer things that seem truly important. It's easier to keep the main thing the main thing.

I'm also reminded about the power of perspective by my father. He turned 89 this summer, and I had been expecting him to tell me that he'd be switching from heating with wood to using the oil furnace I convinced him to install a year ago. He has a completely different perspective, though.  Back in the spring he ordered 20 tons of logs to be delivered and dropped off on his lawn. The logs come on a tractor trailer and make a pile on the ground that's about 20-25 feet long, 20 feet wide, and six feet high. Cut, split, and stacked neatly the pile is 30 feet long by five feet high by ten feet across--nearly twelve full cords, or 48 face-cords. That's a lot of wood! 

Dad could just set the thermostat and relax in his warm and cozy little bungalow. Instead, Dad's perspective is that he has a lot of time; and cutting, splitting, and stacking all that wood is good exercise. He sees it as an added benefit that every stick has to be carried into the basement over the winter months as well. I won't bother to mention that he has no hydraulic splitter because he prefers to split with a sledgehammer and wedges. That's how you get to be strong at 89--the power of perspective.

Business Intelligence is all about perspective too. Reviewing a report sorted by a customer yields certain information, while organizing those same data by product provides different insights. Tools such as dashboards, drill-downs, Active Reports, Visual Discovery, OLAP, and coordinated compound reports provide myriad ways to turn data into information from which knowledge can be obtained. Get creative with your use of Business Intelligence. Do something different in your application and show the data from a new perspective. Squeeze all the bits in all those terabytes on all those machines and make them yield a better return on all the investments you’ve made.