Seeing as we see

As a photographer, I see my world in a different way to how I’d see it if I weren’t keyed into the visual side as much. And in doing so, I try to capture what I see in a way that I experience it at the time. This means I stoop down, climb up high, zoom in or walk further away to get what I want to capture. Later on, when the digital files land on a computer, they get processed in ways that lend more ‘credence’ to how I remember the scene. Well at least to my own mind’s eye.

And then, when two photographers make an image of the same subject, later comparisons almost always show a difference in the final product. After all, our universe exists in four dimensions, time being the final and often most important dimension – ever heard of ‘the moment it clicks’?

When all is said and done, and the camera is packed away and the images are retrieved, a further interpretation is applied. This time to the image pixels in one way or another. Cropping, curves, levels, all that post processing stuff (to be debated later perhaps) to ‘make things look better’ in Photoshop. All of this leaves us with an image that is quite unlike reality as experienced. A while back I wrote on images gaining a new life, a second wind if you will, through seeing old images in a new way with new experiences and new post processing techniques with which to visualise the image.

Recently, I have begun printing my own artwork for hanging and display in our home. There appears little point in letting my images take up cheap disk space with little purpose. So, a lovely long exposure of a seascape was my wife’s Christmas present. Printed on textured fine art paper, matted in white and framed in white it looks quite stunning on the wall. Any image printed at over a metre wide almost always does, but this one is striking in its presentation. A different presentation would leave the beholder with a completely different perspective on the image, even if the image itself was unchanged. Change the medium to canvas fro example and further differences will be evident. There seems to be no end in all of this. All there is, is a beginning. And that beginning is in the photographer’s eye.

PS, no images today, just a bunch of words.

 

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