Hidden in Plain Sight
To be clear right from the start, this blog and its gallery pictures have nothing to do with some hocus-pocus trick photography you might think I have perfected. It turns out, our brains are much more adept at visual trickery than any manual manipulation of a camera’s settings or postproduction editing could ever accomplish. What I’ve been thinking about lately, is the disconnect between perception and reality. In short, what you see is not what you get.
If that’s not totally clear, I put it down to the effects of the eggnog, but here is what science makes very clear. It appears that the human eye can only detect a small range of the energy wavelengths emitted in the so-called visible spectrum. The rest, which is a lot, cannot be observed naturally. So, for example, humans cannot detect wavelengths in the infrared and UV spectrums that are visible to some birds, bees, butterflies, rodents, reptiles and fish. I can live with that, the notion that in some respects we are arguably less evolved than our pet goldfish, however, there are some other facts that I find much more disturbing.
To start with is the notion that our vision is selective. It turns out, there is so much information available in our field of vision at any point in time, we focus only on less than 10% of what the eye captures. To complete the picture, our brains simply ‘fill in the blanks’. Even worse, as the brain apparently has a refresh rate of around 10-20 seconds, what it fills in is an average of what we perceived in the prior 15 seconds, give or take. So, not only is what we think we see and illusion and only a small percentage of what lies in plain sight, it is not even an image of present reality, but just a clever mash up of what the eye saw in the recent past, filtered through the lens of selective focus. Finally, humans have apparently been suffering from a diminishing attention span, down from12 seconds or so in 2000, to less than 8 seconds, on average, in 2013.
In short, we not only don’t see reality, we also don’t spend enough time trying to make sense of what actually is in front of our noses. At least that is what I understand while speed scrolling through all the information floating around the internet on this subject.
So, what does all this rambling have to do with photography? Simply put, I think there are two points I think are worth considering. First, while there are technical experts that toil endlessly on crafting a more perfect image, the reality is that hard won detail and perfection is largely lost on most of us, even if we get ‘nose to print’ on a mega-pixel sharp rendering of a scene or subject. Second, attempts to simplify a scene in a photograph to clarify the photographer’s intention may be a bit of a fool’s errand, as our brain is already screening out most of the detail and we likely won’t spend the time studying the image to discover it.
What is the take away I am trying to impart on this lazy Christmas-Eve afternoon? For photography, I suggest taking more than one pass in looking at the images in my gallery collections. Do you find additional details on a second or third view that you missed at first glance (a hint to get you started – on first glance, did you see more than one Santa cap in the picture of the cactus with a cap?). More broadly and significantly, this is where I think photography insights can turn into valuable life lessons. For example, how often are homeless persons unseen and ignored on the street? How often is a simple act of kindness overlooked, like the elderly individual that could use help with their grocery cart?
As they say – “Tis the Season” – and I intend to not only enjoy looking at good photography during these slow days, but hopefully let that lead me to some useful introspection.
Happy Holidays!