Focused Seeing

This picture of a flower was inspired by another photographer’s work, and I tried this as a learning exercise, and like the way it turned out.

The original picture was color, and although the flower itself was mostly white, there were some other shades such as yellow and green. Also, the background was cluttered, mostly green with some brown branches.

Here is the original picture:

Starting from this color picture, the black and white one was produced with Photoshop.

One interesting thing here is that this technique could be used on flowers of many different colors. Yellow, for example, would probably produce a similar result. But for me, starting with a white flower made the process focus on something that was part of the original flower itself. Then other elements, whether different colors in the flower or things in the background, were removed.

The same process applied to a yellow flower might produce a similar result, but would change a key aspect of the thing being photographed. We would then see a fiction, rather than see more clearly something that is really there.

In these ways, the picture can be a metaphor for focus in our lives. It involves identifying things that are in our situation and removing distractions, whether additional elements or things that cause us to misrepresent or misunderstand the situation.

So perhaps focus becomes an aspect of seeing clearly.