Seeing Waterfalls
This waterfall picture is a combination of two different pictures. One was taken with a short shutter speed, so that the water appears frozen. The other was taken with a long shutter speed, so that the water appears as a silky flow. There are people who prefer both; there is no “right” way to photograph a waterfall because each of the two techniques illustrates something different.
(You can see the two original pictures below; click on the pictures to see larger versions.)
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An Experiment in Looking Carefully
This photograph of a flower was taken in a local rose garden. Like many such photos, it’s been enhanced to show aspects of the flower that, although they were subtle, still jumped out at me enough to want to share them. The very subtle colors of an ostensibly white flower, the overall form and symmetry, the water droplets speaking of a cool, damp, fall morning. All these things were there in the original view, but not as clear.
Click or tap on the picture, and you will see a version of the picture with no distractions around it. Then click or tap again and it will become an interactive picture that lets you look around and see the whole location where the picture was taken.
Swipe to pan around, and pinch to zoom in and out. Find the flower and tap it again to return to the original picture.
Read more A Picture of Evolution
This is the Independence Amphitheater in Independence, Oregon. It’s part of an effort by the town to transform itself from a small historical town into a vibrant destination for other communities.
This spherical picture was my entry for the “Evolution” theme of the World Wide Panorama in 2024.
One meaning of “evolution” is directed change — change that has direction or purpose and is not totally random. We often think of the term as the direction of increasing complexity of biological systems that occurs as the result of natural selection. However, many different systems can evolve when they change purposefully, such as the evolution of this town.
Read more Neskowin Ghost Forest
This is the Neskowin Ghost Forest, a grove of trees that was buried in sand around 2000 years ago.
Although many reports claim that these trees were buried in an earthquake, the best consensus is that they were buried by gradual dune encroachment. This often happens on coastlines.
This buried forest was uncovered in 1997-8 during a winter of El Niño storms and have been exposed ever since.
Read more New Version of UPCA Church Interior
This is an updated version of a previous post of the interior of United Presbyterian Church in Albany, Oregon.
Read moreMore About Waterfall Experiences
This is a picture from a recently posted 360 photo of Majestic Falls. The original picture was for one of my World Wide Panorama projects, and talked about the waterfall in general. I used a different picture of this same waterfall to discuss the idea of qualia; that one was just a normal photograph.
The normal photograph and discussion illustrated ideas of conscious experience and helped me think about the different aspects of experiences that are just based on perceptions, versus those that also involve internal context and related thoughts.
Read more Majestic Falls Again
This is Majestic Falls, the main waterfall at McDowell Creek Falls county park.
Read more Frameless Pictures
When photographs are printed and hung on a wall, they often have a frame and a matte. Sometimes though, photographers, like other visual artists, choose to display their pictures without a frame – so-called “frameless” mounting. The picture here is an example of that.
This example does have a solid side, but sometimes frameless mounts don’t even have that – they may be mounted flat on the wall, or have a small hidden mount behind the picture so that it appears to be floating in front of the wall. In any case, the point is that there is nothing in the same plane as the picture itself.
Read more An Example of Local Wonder
This is a picture of a dandelion, taken along a small lake at a local state park. I’m not sure why it caught my eye. After all, it’s just a weed, something that is generally not thought about much except as a problem, or perhaps occasionally for making tea. For whatever reason, I took this picture.
The picture ended up being surprising in how beautiful this simple little flower appeared. Some enhancements were done in post processing, but only to enhance the colors and shapes already there, and also to deemphasize the background.
Read more Seeing Past Bias
We all have biases that affect how we see the world. As a photographer, one of the things I strive to learn is to see beauty in the world even when it’s not obvious. For example, my bias may be to see the obviously ugly, natural appearance of something, but I will choose to seek to see what else is there. This is perhaps a sort of deliberate bias, but it often reveals unexpected beauty.
Take, for example, this photograph. To me, it looks like a picture of deep space, with glowing gas clouds, fields of stars, and layers of detail that recede into infinity.
In reality, however, this is simply a rusting metal plate. I looked for and found a different aesthetic by refusing to limit myself to what I thought rust should look like and chose to see it a different way. Of course, it did take some processing to make it look like this, but the point is that I was deliberately trying to look beyond my bias of ugliness to find some beauty, and this resulted.
This tendency goes beyond photography, of course, and applies to pretty much all our perceptions, the ways in which we see the world around us. It even applies to scientists who are deliberately trying to extend knowledge beyond current understanding, especially in fields with high uncertainty. It’s common for individuals to start with a proposed answer and attempt to find supporting proof, rather than start with an array of options to narrow down. It’s even less common for people to deliberately try to disprove their preferred understanding.
An example of a scientific domain that reflects this challenge is research into the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is so poorly understood and is such a different phenomenon that it challenges existing views of physicalism (the idea that reality consists of only physical entities). As such, scientific research into it is subject to biased thinking because some approaches to explain it, even though not based on any religious ideas, sound religious to some people and so get immediately rejected.
I’ve written before about how consciousness is a challenging topic and how photography may help. Perhaps one specific possibility is that it can be used to address bias by helping us learn to see beyond our initial perspectives, as I did in the picture above. Sometimes, simply picturing something in a new way can yield helpful insights.
The trick is to apply this sort of thing to thinking critically about consciousness. In this case, it might look like creating metaphors that represent some aspect being studied. Metaphors may help us think about the topic in ways that don’t automatically trigger our biases. Thus, this could help us avoid biases against certain types of solutions, and truly seek whatever the science reveals.