...Too often HB's fail to recognize the lack of common sense in what we see sometimes. The rigidity of their interpretations is their undoing.
True. When I got seriously into photography in the early '70s I slowly became astonished over how lousy my perceptions had been of what I saw -- how many things I had "seen" but never really noticed and appreciated for what they really were.
I had always considered above-ground power and telephone lines to be ugly eyesores, but then I found that with the
right lines and the
right light of a low sun glinting off them, and with the
right scenery and background, and the
right exposure on the
right slide film (prints from negatives are often useless), they could actually make surprisingly attractive photos.
Also, I had never noticed backlighting and rimlighting before. Later in the 70s and 80s, in winter I often went out for a lunchbreak to a nearby intersection where the low noon sun shone along one of the streets and beautifully rimlit the long hair and winter clothing of pedestrians as they crossed at the traffic lights. It was fantastic to relax and watch and appreciate over and over the sights which I had never noticed before getting into photography.
Sometimes I wonder if the "no stars" thing crops up because of movies and TV, particularly space stories. Of course there are always stars showing in bright sunlight (which is impossible in real life), but how often do they give us a vista of
real, recognisable constellations? We can't expect to see those in the Star Wars movies because they are filmed "in a galaxy far, far away", but surely we should be able to see them in something that's set in our own solar system.
There's an ad on New Zealand TV at the moment which shows twinkling "stars" that look nothing like the real night sky, and in over 50 years of viewing them, I can only ever recall seeing
one case of any fictional advertisement, TV programme or movie showing recognisable constellations. I was amazed!
Instead we often see the sort of nonsense like in (IIRC) the Leonardo DiCaprio movie
The Beach. A girl in the tropics had a Hasselblad with a standard lens on a tripod, pointed the camera almost vertically up, and took time exposures of a few seconds. "So far, so good for once," I thought. "If we see the results there should be slightly streaked stars near the ecliptic." We did see the results, but they were very long exposures with stars circling the north celestial pole and taken from about 40 to 50 or even 60 degrees north latitude. To get just a
slightly similar shot, with the pole star close to the horizon, the lens axis would have needed to be nearly horizontal.
Another thing that wakes us up regarding our perceptions is to see an extremely wide-angle photo of a recognisable scene, such as a shot of a long brick wall with the lens axis at right-angles to its centre. Often viewers will exclaim that the wall is distorted, but, except for the usual minor distortions of most lenses, that might not be the case. The main problem is that our brains are too good at reinterpreting things we see and making them acceptable to us. We need to study that wall from the same perspective as the camera, turning our head up, down and to both sides, and noting how the lines of of the bricks recede to a vanishing-point in all areas except those very close to the lens axis.
It can be quite startling to stand at the centre of an end wall in any large, rectangular room in a house and hold up two straightedges so that they match the joins between the side walls and ceiling or floor. Betcha your brain has been deceiving you all along over how sharply they converge to a vanishing-point.
Perceptions, experiences, emotions, memories and understanding are everything, and very important during circumstances which don't match any previous experiences we've understood.
I guess those are what make most of us poor eyewitnesses of any out-of-the ordinary or frightening event.
