White-breasted Nuthatch : Conventional Wisdom

White-breasted Nuthatch

This is a White-breasted Nuthatch.  If you look at the spotlit face, you might notice that something seems a little off.  It’s the exposure.  One of the most fundamental aspects of photography is nailing the exposure, getting just the right amount of light onto the subject to reveal its beauty but not so much that the light actually obscures detail.  Nuthatches live in dense forests, which for a photographer means a challenging mix of deep shadows and, like here, the occasional shaft of so-intense sunlight.  Software programs are routinely used post-production to fix exposure and to present an image that more closely matches the camera’s output to what the human eye saw at the time.  So why not follow convention and tamp it down?

There is a famous statue of Moses carved by Michelangelo.  It is astonishingly lifelike.  The muscles, the clothing, even the veins and tendons are exact.  And, as part of this statue that is accurate in every detail, Moses has horns.  Horns.  Perhaps Michelangelo was expressing anti-Jewish feelings prevalent in 16th century Italy.  Moses is depicted with the horns of a devil or demon, an exemplar of evil Jews.  Or perhaps the horns reflect an erroneous Bible translation from St. Jerome.  He evidently read of Moses’s descent from Mt. Sinai, and where the Hebrew speaks of Moses’s face being “radiant,” Jerome mistranslated the word as “horned.”  Either way, “Jews have horns” became widely accepted conventional wisdom.

So much of what we “know” in business is conventional wisdom, and sometimes, it’s just utterly wrong.  Just a few examples….  Everyone knew that only specialized sales people could sell computers - until Michael Dell ran an 800-number out of his dorm room.  Everyone knew that only tiny co-ops and local grocers could sell health foods - until John Mackey built Whole Foods into a multibillion dollar example of Conscious Capitalism.  And everyone knows that Elon Musk can’t possibly be doing any of the things  - that he’s doing every day.  Visionaries make their bones by questioning conventional wisdom.  I left the unconventional exposure on the Nuthatch’s face to remind us of other radiant faces - and other conventional wisdom.