Single mindedness

When we hear the word monochrome  a black and white photograph is usually the image conjured up in our mind.  We’ve come to equate the two but in reality monochrome simply means a single color (monokhromos, Greek, meaning of one color).  For photographers it has come to be an image created with a range of tones of a single color and since silver nitrate based images are white with tones of grey until total black, the association with B&W photography.  Any single color, though, can be considered monochromatic.

Wandering through the woods today, a nicely overcast and drizzling rain sort of day, I was overwhelmed with the monochromatic nature of the woods right now.  Here green is the color, profuse in its spread across the ground, the sky, the air.  Spring flowers are gone now – the seasonal change was overnight.  Sun and warmth have encouraged the plants to wake up fast and push their chlorophyll instruments out into full spread, wrapping the whole forest in a wash of greens.  Even the overcast light filtered in with a tinge of green, softening the darker areas of the deeper woods and offering an invitation to come in to explore.

At first I was not thrilled; I really was looking for some spring color, saturated in the even light.  Confronted with waves of a single color I kept strolling along the path, more walking than looking, until I realized what a benefit this would be.  B&W photographers teach us to look for forms, shapes, tones – escape the seduction of color and see what’s really there.  Yet doing so is difficult as our vision system is immersed in a world of color.  But what about when it’s all the same?  Where it’s all green?  Now the task becomes easier as the monochromatic environment lets the brain get beyond color seeking and into pattern and tone recognition.

The more I looked around with this realization filtering out the monochrome green the more I started to see the wonderful patterns that make up the forest.  Trunks become limbs, which become branches, which become feathery extensions brushing the sky with their leafy bristles.  The carpeted ground runs right up to the shrubs, who continue the theme into the canopy of trees.  Even where the color is interrupted it remains as a backdrop to highlight the few remaining spring artifacts.

Beyond the forest the theme continues.  The once spring-swollen river recedes, leaving the sand and mud bed wrinkled and textured.  Green gives way to yellow and browns – even the water maintains the monochrome nature of the soil – as the constant attack of water drains away the colors of the forest from any residents unfortunate enough to leave one environ for another.

Early photography was B&W because of limited chemical knowledge and the lack of technology needed to apply it effectively.  Now color springs from the touch of a cellphone to light up computer screens.  Before the world was color, though, it was shape and form – the Bible talks of God giving the darkness shape but there’s no mention there about color.  He must have gotten around to that later.  If there is a priority to the visual elements then shape and form must come first, defining for us the meaning of light and shadows and enabling us to explore dimension in what we see around us.  In the world of painting the Impressionists gave color primacy over drawing but still their goal was a new means to portray shape, not a denial of its importance.  Modern photography continues returning to its roots in monochrome, always revisiting form and tone as a way to enhance the application and appreciation of color.

 

Yeah, but which color?

I have this pair of sunglasses that selectively filter part of the spectrum – I’m not sure which wavelengths.  As a result, the fall colors to me are just astounding.  I go around exclaiming about this tree or that bush only to have people look at me with a “so what” expression.  I’ve finally gotten into the habit of looking over my sunglasses at a scene before I gush about it, just to make sure it’s going to be somewhat great for everyone else.

Does this mean I live my life behind colored glasses, seeing a distorted version of reality that others can’t connect with?

As it turns out, my eyes don’t see color equally.  I discovered this as a microbiology student while learning to peer into binocular microscopes.  These are great tools to give dimensionality to very tiny things, but at first using them can be disconcerting.  My instructor told me to close one eye while looking through both eyepieces (the place where you look into a microscope) and then gradually open the closed eye to give my brain time to create the binocular image.  Sort of like dealing with the 3D glasses in theaters.  While fiddling around with this procedure I found that one eye is much more sensitive to the orange part of the spectrum than the other.  Opening and closing one eye at a time I found the “white” light in the microscope would be warmer in one eye than the other.  Apparently this is not an uncommon attribute of our vision system and our brain just deals with it, processing the two signals into a consistent set of colors.

Does this explain my affinity for fall colors, because one eye is particularly sensitive to the warm wavelengths of white light?

Color does have an emotional impact on us, one that is exploited constantly by graphic images, advertising, fashion, and yes, photography.  We have our favorite colors, are described as being part of a color palette (they are a summer color person), use colors in our speech to describe emotional attributes (I’m just blue today) – all behaviors linking our perception of certain wavelengths of light to actions and expectations.  An image can be constructed to convey specific motivations and possibly compel certain actions or conclusions, all by the use of colors.

It’s no wonder the fine art photographers so rarely use color, believing B&W is easier to control for image construction but in some sense they are simply admitting a lack of control over color superior enough to craft the message they want their image to convey.  Our reactions to colors, alone and in conjunction, are just unpredictable for the most part.  Who knows what a person is seeing when they view a colored image.

So we craft images of color striving to achieve what we think viewers are expecting to see.  Although our memory of specific colors is pretty poor (try remembering the exact color of your car in a parking lot and then see how many different variations you think are correct) we are good at pattern recognition – a general sense of what color things ought to be.  Photographers know getting colors into the “expectation set” of being correct for a composition will not turn viewers off but it remains difficult to predict what kind of fine-tuning of colors is required in order to WOW viewers.

Perhaps we should just pass out versions of my sunglasses.

Kodak E100 4x5 film, 210mm, 1/8 sec., f/45

You didn’t think I’d let this wrap up without a fall foliage photo did you?

Einstein said the universe is circular but this is ridiculous

Does your world bend?  I mean, you know how the world looks to you as you glance around so the question is, does your world bend?

Evolution has resulting in three visual benefits to our species:  1. Binocular vision enables us to judge distance, 2. Wide angle of view means we can quickly scan a large area, and 3. Our brain corrects what our eyes see so our perception fits our preconceived notion of what the world ought to look like.

You aren’t aware of that last one?  Brain does a pretty good job, doesn’t it.

One frustration about photographs is they show exactly what the camera saw, not necessarily what we were seeing at the time.  The classic perspective issue is photographing skyscrapers with regular cameras – the resulting pictures show a building behaving like a railroad track in that the sides slope toward each other, receding to some infinite point outside the picture frame.  Yet while standing there we don’t see that.  Well, our eye sees it and the image of it is recorded on our retina, but our brain “corrects” the image so we perceive the sides as being straight because in our world buildings don’t behave that way.  We need specialized photography equipment to make this correction that our brain does on the fly.

That’s a typical example in just about any photography book.  I ran across another just this week while playing around with another form of image, the panoramic.  We’ve all seen this type of expansive photograph but do we ever think about whether what we’re seeing is what was actually there?

The old fashioned way of making these images was to literally piece together different pieces of film to make one larger image.  You had to work with what you had and make them all fit together.  In the digital world there is software that does that for us, stitching together multiple files and blending them into a seamless wide-angle photograph.  And that’s where the question comes to play.

In Photoshop you are given layout options on how you want these multiple images stitched and blended together.  The two most common are called “Perspective” and “Reposition.”  According to Adobe, here’s what these two options are doing:

Perspective – Creates a consistent composition by designating one of the source images (by default, the middle image) as the reference image. The other images are then transformed (repositioned, stretched or skewed as necessary) so that overlapping content across layers is matched.

Reposition – Aligns the layers and matches overlapping content, but does not transform (stretch or skew) any of the source layers.

As an example here are the same images run through Photoshop’s panoramic merge routine, each choosing a different layout option.

Perspective

Reposition

As you see, they result in different images so which one represents reality?  I was standing there and I can’t remember what I saw.  You think a straight road is the correct version (the road in front of the camping area is indeed straight) but other elements don’t fit that.  The trees in the middle of the lower image were actually closer to my camera than the ones on the end so they should look as they do – larger.  That fits with my expectation.  But it appears that in order to have the trees in their proper relationship the road has to curve.  How could my eye see nearer/larger trees and yet still see a straight road?  In case the odd shape of the top images leads you to believe it’s been cropped, notice it has the same visual elements as the lower image.  All the information is there, it’s just shaped differently.

I enjoy panoramics as a way to portray lots of detail.  The reason I was making this image was to play with a new piece of equipment to help make better panoramics but now it’s got me confused.  Which perspective is the real one?

Sometimes it’s just a photograph

Freud realized many times people would read too much into his analytics, hence the admonishment about cigars.  Looking over my recent posts it appears I’ve been exploring photographic metaphors and allegories but in my defense these things have been on my mind.  I’ve been trying to step away from being a technical photographer and to simply see – like a child, like the camera, like an alien from another planet.  And then capture those sights.  It’s a learning process.  I don’t do drugs so I’ve got to try something to expand my mind!

But today, just a couple of nice images from the front yard, rejoicing in spring sunshine and a bee’s delighted point of view.

Shake things up

Perspective in photography can create drama, showing us something in an unexpected or unintended manner and eliciting various emotions about the image or subject.  Perspective is all about how we regard something, what information we bring to the moment, what bias we filter that information through and what realization we arrive at in the end.  Really, doesn’t perspective in just about everything create drama?  What would reality TV be without sudden shifts in perspective in what we know about the participants?  How could film noir convey the impending doom or fearful encounters it is famous for without the unique perspective the cameramen used?  Notice the seemingly infinite number of political conclusions that can be drawn based on the perspective someone has about a fact and the drama built by all the talking heads.

We get comfortable with our perspectives, viewing the reality around us with expectations on outcomes that won’t startle or surprise us.  In business the mantra is “no surprises” as if the steady hand on the helm of decision-making is an assured way to reach desired results.  Yet it is the very surprises we seek to avoid that bring excitement to our lives.  The momentary thrill that passes through us when something new appears and clicks in our minds as a sudden revelation about objects, actions, decisions, etc.  For some, this drama is to be avoided at all costs; to others, it is to be embraced and embodied.  For all, it is a jolt, a shock that what we expected isn’t always what we get.

Actively seeking perspective shifts makes us more comfortable with change.  Not only do we learn to realize something viewed from a different vantage point remains the same object (alleviating the fear of the unknown) but we learn to seek out alternative vantage points as a way to learn (what’s on the other side of the mountain?).  The admonition to walk a mile in someone’s shoes is more about realizing what goes on in another person’s mind in contrast to mine than it is to see the world through their eyes.  Arguments may ensue about the details of a perceived subject but these are secondary to the differences in the meaning about the subject to each person.  We may disagree about the color of a tomato but that is seriously trivial to the contrast between your belief it is the devil’s fruit and mine that it is essential to Italian cooking.

Some landscapes possess drama in their very form – the “grand” landscapes we see in images or stand and admire.  Other landscapes need a change of perspective to add drama as a way to share the appreciation of how the world looks from another’s point of view.  So you lie down in the grass to get a bug’s eye view of the world – what’s that going to cost you compared to the new perspective?  And how will it impact how you view future fields of grass?

Break on through to the other side

We see but do not perceive.  Or perceive but don’t know.  Know, but may not care.  Care, but not act.  Chains of cause-and-effect started with a simple glance.  Some glances stir us to behavioral changes – the glance of a lover.  Others repulse us with emotion – a dead animal on the roadside.  We should live our lives in continual stress, anticipating the impact of the next glance, flinching with every blink.  Or wear blinders to protect ourselves, to focus our vision only in front, on the future-to-come controlled by our intention.

Yet as a species we seek out the unknown, desirous of an expanded field of perception and new knowledge.  We riddle ourselves with mind games aimed at changing perspectives, incorporating new data, molding unique neural paths.  Against the threat of stagnation or tunnel vision or single mindedness, we explore extrasensory realms hoping to bring back an altered view of our lives that will expand our sense of value or existence.  Religion, chemicals, thrills, philosophies – all have been means to an expanded sense of being.

 

Aldous Huxley experimented with most of these in an attempt to “break down the barriers of ego” and recorded his experiences with mescaline in the book The Doors of Perception, the title of which was inspiration for Jim Morrison naming of The Doors rock group.  Huxley took his title from William Blake, who reflected Huxley’s thinking on seeing beyond the immediate reality – “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”  Poets, writers, composers – those who seek out what’s beyond the glance and experiment with the means to discover what they feel is missing from their perception.

And a world of newness does exist out there, but it is firmly grounded in reality.  The microscopic views of creatures in a water droplet remind us of unseen worlds we walk through continually.  Or the unimaginably massive galactic objects we learn about from space telescopes, reminding us we are also part of an unseen world to any beings existing on that scale.  Of interest to me, though, is the world of time and how greater perception of change over time reveals a recognizable yet unique world.

 

Stand on the ocean shore and watch the waves break onto the beach.  You admire the graceful curve of the water and the power it exerts on the sand.  In your sight, it is a continuous event, flowing as time passes by.  To the camera, though, time is a relative and controllable aspect, enabling the photographer to portray reality in contexts we aren’t readily aware of.

The fast shutter speed freezes motion, holding a slice of time still for us to examine many aspects we would normally miss or ignore.  Our perception of the wave changes as we see more of its structure, the details of its makeup and architecture.  We admire the way color plays through it, blending at the edges into the white foam.  The ever-changing patterns are now held in place – we see how liquid and air work together to create the spectacle we see only briefly.

 

A change of pace for the camera to a slow shutter speed and now we see changes over time, not as a stop action stutter step of frames but as a continuous blend of images.  Here is revealed the beginning, end and all aspects in between, rendered in a single image for all to see.  The water’s true nature is on display as it flows in and around obstacles, ethereal with an otherworldly existence.  In opposition to the hard view of the frozen image here we question the actual existence of the water – is it a dream?

Both perspectives exist; they are not a trick of the camera or software.  Our grounding in time’s flow, one second per second, confines our ongoing view of reality.  Only with the use of tools can we perceive the world in an alternative manner.  Do the tools change our reality, then, or are we living in a minute fraction of the totality of reality?

The granularity of reality

It was the Greeks who started documenting their questions about the reality around them.  And their queries were what you would expect when people start talking about fundamental issues – “How big is big?  How small is small?  Why is the sky up there and the ground down here?”  It’s from their discussions we have the term atom, which when I was growing up was considered the smallest possible thing around (those were the days).

The term came from the Greek concept of reductionism – what do you get if you continue to divide something in half over and over again?  They seemed to realize this can be carried to ridiculous degrees (reductio ad absurdum) and so decided there must be a point to call a halt, where an object cannot be divided further without losing its fundamental character.  Hence, atoms, objects they never expected to actually see, just theoretical constructs that were handy to shut down the reduction discussions.

It would probably amaze them to see the IBM photographs of individual atoms manipulated to spell words or to hear discussions among physicists discussing particles that make up atoms or even the physical nature of empty space itself.

In our images we also discuss fundamental aspects of perception – How big can our images be?  How small can our images portray?  What are the limits to our ability to show the world what we’re seeing?

Originally it was a matter of chemistry.  Silver halide crystals in film shrunk in size over the decades as the chemical companies improved their technology, resulting in film grain (those random speckles you see on film when magnified) that became the size of bacteria.  Finer and finer details could be portrayed on prints and images could be displayed in larger and larger dimensions (my earliest memory of Kodachrome was a 35mm slide blown up 500x to create the Kodak Colorama at Grand Central Station).

Interestingly, Kodak was an early developer of digital sensors, leading to another revolution in photography.  Early sensors gave no competition to film with their limited amount of captured information but over the decades improvements in technology have narrowed the difference, to the current class of sensors with pixels near the size of film grain.  The ability to pack a sensor with pixels and the race for increasing megapixels has resulted in digital images that can show details in prints or be displayed at sizes comparable to film.  Arguments about the benefits of one over the other continue to ensue.  The Greeks would be amused.

Kodachrome slide, Photoshop, NIK plug-ins

But to what goal is all our chattering?  We portray what we see in a manner we want it to be seen.  Our reductionism in technology hasn’t fundamentally altered the nature of photography – it’s still a box used to direct light from lens to capture medium – but it has provided us with more tools to craft our final images.  We’ve begun to appreciate a broader diversity of vision; the Internet gives us access to images made with very old tools and the latest silicon implements.  Each embodies the nature of reality to the photographer.  Razor sharp detail at the smallest level or grungy dynamic portrayals, and the complete span between, are all available with the click of a button, on camera or computer.  We are literally only bounded by the limits of our imagination.

What would you see if you were assured of success in portraying it?

An eagle’s eye

Any article about eagles usually contains some description of how amazing their eyesight is compared to we mere humans.  The science of their visual system is pretty straightforward, the result of evolution leading to sharp-eyed survivors over the millennium.  What is not so easy to grasp is what it’s like to live in such a world.  What if you could read newspapers at a mile away?  How would that influence your relationship with reality all around  you?

I was watching a webinar today about panoramic landscape techniques and the instructor was showing off his digital medium format camera, one of the benefits being more information collected that can become greater resolving power in the image.  As an example he used a photograph he’d made at Yellowstone, a version of which I made as well (along with hundreds of other people since Artist’s Point is one of the most popular spots after Old Faithful).

To show off the resolving power of his camera he zoomed in on the top of the waterfall to show there are people standing at another overlook.  It was impressive for those of us who are wow-ed by resolving power.  But it got me to thinking – when I made the above image I didn’t notice that overlook or any people there.  Did I miss something while standing there?  The above image is from a 4×5″ slide I made with my view camera so I put the film back into my scanner, highlighted the area around the falls and scanned at 6400ppi.  And I found this.

How about that – there are people there all the time as well.  I would have never noticed that.  It’s a little grainy but keep in mind this is an enlargement of about 1% of an image taken from 1/2 mile away.  I really need to stop worrying about focus on my view camera….

The point of this is not to show off my Yellowstone photo or impress with the resolving power of the lens, but rather to think about the kind of world an eagle lives in.  In their world the people standing on this overlook 1/2 mile away are very apparent.  As is every detail between the overlook by the falls and Artist’s Point.  All the rocks, pine needles, waves in the water – everything is apparent.  Sure, their visual system is impressive for resolving power but think about what their mind has to do in order to sort through all those details to identify the few truly important ones – fish surfacing in the stream, deer carcass in the next valley over, mate sitting in nest in a distant tree or outcropping.  That’s pretty impressive.

And that’s for a predator.  Our evolutionary relatives were probably more in the prey category, benefiting from our binocular vision to tell not necessarily what something in the distance could be but rather which way is it going – toward me or away from me.  The eagle needs sharp eyesight to find specific food; we apparently only need to be able to gauge how far away.

What would our lives be like to have an eagle’s perception?  We think multi-tasking makes life complicated at times with all the different inputs to be sorted and dealt with but what if we had to process every little detail?  Would that be a blessing or a curse?  Or just an episode of the Twilight Zone?

Would it affect our personal relationships if we picked up every little tic of people around us?  Would highway accidents decrease if we could see problems that far ahead of us?  Would we finally be able to see the trees instead of the forest?

The adjustment from regular to HD TV has been interesting as consumers now get movie quality pictures in their homes.  And one comment I’ve read about the new iPad3 screen is the resolution is so much greater that pictures formerly looking pretty good are now rather not-sharp.  So, technology may be answering my question as we continue to enhance our ability to see more around us.  Certainly the history of such changes reveals as more is provided, more will be demanded.  But at what point will our brains cry “enough!” as the visual stimulus builds?

Do I perceive what I see?

Through most of our education process we learn our eyes are the organ of sight.  We study cut-away diagrams of the eyeball with rays of light passing through the cornea and lens to fall on the retina in the back, usually showing an upside down version of the subject we are looking at.  Classic optics – Isaac Newton would be comfortable with such a diagram.  Yet in all our classes we seem to learn only half the process.

The retina responds to light hitting it by generating a multitude of signals that pass down the optic nerve to the brain.  Here they are processed and the final information connected to other information stored in other parts of the brain and we suddenly get a realization – “Oh, a flower.”

There are ongoing philosophical conversations about what’s happening to our reality in the very short duration between pointing our eyes at something and getting the realization of what it is but that’s a different discussion from this one.  I’m more interested in the pattern recognition ability of our visual system.  Just how much information do we need in order for that final realization to take place?

ISO 100, 50mm, 1/400 sec., f/2.5

For example, in the image above, the near flower is easily recognized – it is in focus, is it closest to the viewer, and it corresponds to a shape we’re used to seeing this time of year.  Behind the near flower is a purple blob – what is that?  Most people will also recognize this as a flower, one very much like the first one.  Even though blurred it retains a similar shape, has similar coloration in the middle, and an indistinct yet present stem is apparent beneath it.

What about that far purple blob?  Again, most people would connect it with the first two and declare it to also be a flower yet it has none of the characteristics of the first two.  The shape is different, the color more uniform, there are no secondary features like the stem.  Is it a flower or not?  More interesting to me, how much more information does the average viewer need to draw a conclusion?  Hard to say, probably different for each person.  Nonetheless, most people will call it a flower simply because it is proximate to the other two.

So what is this?  If you never saw the first image what would you recognize it as?  There is no defining structure, just blurred colors.  The blur itself seems to have a structure but is it relevant to the subject or just an artifact of the processing?

As it turns out, it also is a flower whose image has been changed with an editing tool.

Artists either show us things we’ve never seen before or show us things we see everyday but in a new way.  But is it art if we don’t recognize it as something?  The Impressionists departed from the Classical way of painting by using paint as their tool for details instead of drawing.  The Cubists continued the journey away from Classical painting by deconstructing subjects into more basic forms.  Yet even Picasso’s Cubist portraits of women can be identified as women.

If we are unable to perceive something we see, something that has been created by an artist to show us a new or different view of reality, has the artist failed or succeeded?  Is art just for seeing?  Or is perception an equally important factor in appreciating that your reality has been jolted?

How much information does the artist need to supply in their work in order to enable perception (assuming it is important)?  It seems to me this is a vague transition – too much information and the image is documentary; too little information and the image is abstract to the point of being unintelligible.  Somewhere in between, lying in a grey area, resides the “just-right” amount of information that will attract seeing as well as satisfy perception.

I pursue detail in my landscapes and other images because I believe all that information is important to appreciate the photograph.  Yet other photographers have different opinions and approaches.  My challenge is to explore how to present an image that is attractive and perceptual without excessive detail, a way to tell the story without all the words and phrases.

Where is it I think I’m going?

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”

A phrase instantly recognizable to any junior high student tasked with learning about poetry, or any high school student agonizing about allegory, or any college student pondering how to make it through a philosophy term paper.  The quintessential Robert Frost reference, useful for many circumstances where decision is the issue at hand.

But, as the modern physicist would say, how do we know the roads diverge?  What makes us believe a simple fork in the road actually leads to different destinations?  And does following one path truly mean we alienate our experience from what the other path offers?

The condition of a decision, seemingly brought on by the perception of multiple choices at a point in time, manifests itself in many ways across the human race.  Some are frozen to inaction by it while others breeze through to a path with nary a care.  One group gathers data and analyzes the possible outcomes for reward and risk while another group flips a coin and offloads the resulting choice to the physics of gravity and angular momentum.  But what does a decision actually mean?  How much of who we will become is actually controlled by the choices of today?

Being true to oneself, a la Shakespeare, seems to entail more consistency with one’s interests, attitudes, personal style or intentions.  At decision points doesn’t it seem these come into play more than the number of choices or the possible ramifications of one versus the other?  Doesn’t it feel that a particular choice just “feels” right out of all the potential candidates?  And not in a “force be with you” type of rightness, but a “I can see myself going this way” consistency with self.

ISO100, 14mm, 13 sec., f/16

The image is a metaphor…or not.  My initial impression of the scene was the contrast of a human design against the seeming randomness of the surrounding nature, contrasting elements being one way to create interesting images.  My impression upon processing was how this would be a better B&W image than color, a way to let the tones compose the story rather than the hues.  After processing the image to B&W I realized the metaphor, that we create these paths though life with the intent of arriving at some foreseen destination only to discover our path is guided by more than a simple decision at a point in time.  And any one choice may lead us back to the path we were originally following.  Our path is a result of who we have become, possibly more than what we want to be.

“Life is the sum of all your choices.”  Albert Camus