Meta-reflection

I was out early enough today to see some sunlight. It was very cold, especially where the mist was drifting off the river and I watched a roe deer for a while as it tried to warm itself up.

By photojournalistic standards, this photo is actually a cheat: I flipped it left-to-right to make an image which the eye followed better. If you look on Flickr you can see some others photos I took at the same time.

What I am unsure about is whether I should allow myself to cheat like this. I engage in photography as a 'decorative art' for personal but shared pleasure, much like gardening or serious cooking, so at one level all that matters is the end result. But with any such activity, part of the creative pleasure is the challenge of working within constraints, and my self-imposed constraint is that my photos should depict what was there to be seen. I take that to rule out flipping images, but allow B&W conversions and cropping.

However, it is only a small cheat - like buying a ready made ragù - and in this case I can justify it by the thought that all I have done is to reflect an image of reflections, creating a mirror image of mirror images, and thus just taken the reflexity to a higher level!

"Anything you can do, I can do meta, I can do anything meta than you ..."