Improvement of Different Outlook

I believe that just like beauty improvement is in the eye of the beholder.  Many of the things that I do in my life are very subjective...photography, scrapbooking, journaling...all are my opinions of the world and how I see things at that time, so if I change the way I am doing stuff is it improvement or just a different perspective?  In some areas I believe I have improved...take the following pictures for instance...

The photo on the left was taken in June 1990 at Peggy's Cove,  Nova Scotia, Canada... The photo on the right was taken in May 2009 at Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada.  Most would say that the one on the right is a much better photo, but is it?  In the photo on the left I was trying to show my husband's smallness against the giant ocean behind him...the one on the right I was taking a photo of my children and just wanted the lake as a background...is one a better picture than the other or just a different perspective?  I know my photography skills have improved...I used to cut people's heads off, many of the pictures I took were out of focus and there was a lot of clutter and junk in the photos that really ruined whatever look I was going for.  I have started to understand aperture and depth of field and all that photography lingo (somewhat) and I am told I have an eye for what will look good and what won't...but maybe I had that

eye before just never really pushed myself...after all the picture on the left was taken with a 110 point and shoot camera...I am sure you people remember the ones...silly little cameras, ones you see children playing with that if you wanted flash you had to put a strip of flash bulbs on the top.  Honestly looking at thing it is a wonder I got any good pictures at all :)  You had to look through a view finder the size of a small peanut and hope that what you saw was what you ended up with, you had no zooming capabilities unless you just moved closer.  The photo on the right was taken with a Canon EOS Digital XSi with a 75-300mm zoom lense...totally different cameras, should kind of expect totally different pictures right?

Then there is my scrapbooking.  I was a late bloomer to the scrapbooking craze I started after looking at some pages my mother in law had done of my children.  Her scrapbook pages are quite simple but I loved how she had captured the memories of the moment as well as the pictures and I thought I would give it a try...although when it came to paper scrapbooking I was at a lose, I had no idea what to do...so she gave me a program or two and said try these...digital scrapbooking ???  So I started at first it was just putting a picture or two on a page with some 

thing I thought worked, played with cool fonts and hoped I was creating something that worked...then I tried to make them more complicated, I tried to add things, more text, journaling or just more embellishments to make them more complicated...but they were still very simple.  I had started using embellishments that people had created and posted as free downloads...instead of just using the simple stuff provided with the programs I was using.

I had looked at many layouts and saw many techniques I liked and layouts that I thought were beautiful and wanted to give a try, but no matter what I did my layouts remained what would be considered simple.  I love the layouts that allow the pictures to speak for themselves, that the title or journaling tell the story but don't usually take over the layout.  In my opinion scarpbooks are to tell the story behind the pictures and to let the pictures and journaling tell the story not to overpower them with embellishments and stuff...now some would say my scrapbooks have improved and

 others would say they are pretty much the same...but to me I don't really see them as improved just different.  I see scrapbooking differently now than I did when I started out and I am not sure that my technique has really improved just changed.  As I said beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that is never more obvious than in art.  Some people think layouts with lots of embellishments are beautiful to me I think they are too busy, some people think layouts without a lot of embellishments are boring I see them as simple beauty.  The same goes for photography some people see some pictures with a critical eye, finding the faults and the way they would do things if they had taken that photo instead of looking for the beauty in what they see...

So remember improvement like beauty is in the eye of the behold, if you think you are doing things better than you were before then you improved even if others say your 'work' is not better or even worse than it used to be...but most of all enjoy what you do...good or bad doesn't really matter :)