As many of you will know, or intuitively realised, I am very much the original tech loving geek. I have been interested in photography the whole of my adult life, indeed I sold my first image to my school deputy head at the tender age of 14.
Recently I’ve been trying to take pictures of birds while they are flying at Sutton Bingham near to us here in Yeovil where I was able to capture a herring hull, birds that are both common and a bit of a nuisance. Nonetheless I do think they have a certain beauty. I also spent a fantastic morning at Radipole lake in Weymouth and was privileged to observe and photograph marsh Harriers which are nationally quite rare birds.

I’ve been enjoying this very much and it led me to think that actually the process used to get these images is rather similar to the technologies that we use in the practice for making the 3d models we use in our orthodontic care. In both cases the process is now entirely digital and produces a raw digital file  that is noisy due to the process being on the edge of current technological ability. Both use high end digital processing to bring out the information in the original data, in the case of the digital model resulting in a representation of the patients teeth that is far better than traditional impressions can yield whilst the final bird photo bears little resemblance to the fuzzy dot on the original image! It’s an exciting time to be an orthodontist as I truly believe these new technologies are allowing me to treat cases I couldn’t have treated before and to do so using patient friendly near invisible appliances, this is of course great for patients but also for me; I went into orthodontics to make people’s smiles better and I’m delighted that new tools are available that allow me to do that.

I hope you enjoy the spring and if you see me out camera in hand trying to photograph some of our local wildlife, do say hello.

Dr M Brickley.