Seeing what’s there
A camera mimics the human eye in many ways. If you go outside in bright sunlight and squint as hard as you can – even use your fingers to squish your eye a bit…that is the same as setting the aperture on a camera to a very small opening which for some reason is a very high numbered f-stop but my point is…squishing down the eye’s pupil is the same as making a camera’s aperture small. Try it – you will SEE that everything is in sharp focus – from up close to far away.
If you have ever had your eyes dilated for an eye exam, then you know what things look like through the camera when the aperture is open wide…again somewhat confusingly – a small numbered f-stop in a camera means the lens is wide open. Back to remembering what it is like after the dilation – too much light, hard to focus…in camera-speak, a short depth of field.
Now, the camera also has shutter speed and ISO…I’m ignoring those… The point of this post – is the human brain. When we “look” at the world, we look with not only our eyes, but with our brain. Our brains can spin, filter and focus. A camera captures everything that is there.
Here is the photo of my front porch – taken to show the wreath and the placque:
In the large window to the right there is a blue blur -my reflection. When I prepared this photo for the original post, I saw the reflection and I toyed with the idea of removing it. I decided that it was subtle and blurry enough to leave – that it did not distract from the “subject” of the photo which was the overall “front porch” and the situation of the wreath and placque.
But Beth, a friend and reader of the blog, commented
“Love the hint of your reflection in the window. Consider playing with that a bit more – I’m always intrigued with layers of meaning in the visual image”
Hmmmm…..it made me think.
It made me think about what we see with our brains, with our mind….versus what is really there to see.
I’m not proficient enough to seriously sharpen and bring into focus, the reflection of me in the window. I blurred everything else so that the reflection is somewhat prominent.
But the point is…we tend to look at the world, at all of the things we “see” daily, with “brain focus”. We edit with our brain what we see with our eyes. As a new and enthusiastic photographer, I see the world a bit differently since I started using photographs to illustrate my writing, my “points”, my life. I am often as surprised at what the camera captures as I am the direction my writing takes. The camera and to some extent, the writing, they see what is there.
As I took the photo of the front porch, I “saw” through the camera, the front porch. But the camera saw and recorded “me” photographing the front porch. The camera sees what’s there – I am starting to see what’s there also.