I listen to a lot of Podcasts. For those of you that don't know, a Podcast is like a radio show about a topic area that you are interested in. Most of the ones I listen to are about photography and the business of photography. Recently I was listening to a photography podcast that talked about expanding your creativity by the use of your lens to determine perspective. The lens that they were talking about was your eye and your field of view. The person being interviewed discussed perspective in this manner. This may be an old story to some of you as it is described in Steven Covey's, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. To paraphrase, a man is on a subway when another man and his many children get on the train. The train is rather empty and the children are causing a ruckus, making a lot of noise, and generally out of control. The first man is very bothered and disturbed by their actions and is internally very critical of the Father who is just sitting there looking down at the floor and doing nothing about the behavior. The first man is thinking about the misbehaving children and what an irresponsible parent the Father is. Just then the Father looks up at the man and tells him that they have just left the hospital where his wife has died, the children do not know it, and he's thinking of a way to tell them when he get's home. In the meantime he's letting them blow off a little steam. What a different perspective you get when the Father speaks up. All of a sudden we empathize and want to help. There are a lot of things we can learn about from this story, the least of which is photography. When you hear about something happening in the world, or close to you, don't be so quick to judge. Remember, situations that we encounter are not black and white. Life is mostly gray, and the difference may just be our perspective. Change your perspective every once in a while, understand, and be a better person. And you thought this was going to be about photography!