I took this picture recently while on a photo walk. During the walk, I was intentionally open to new perspectives, so it’s easier to notice things that I would normally miss.
In this case, it seemed like the box appeared to be a face. Now, this box is in our front yard and I’ve probably looked at it hundreds of times without noticing that. But with an open mind, the association jumped out.
I recently took a picture of some plants that had interesting leaves. The picture had a calm aspect, the details on the leaves looking almost fuzzy. A little later, I reprocessed it to be black and white. The result gave a different feel to the picture. With the green color removed, the unusually shaped leaves and almost spiky texture jumped out.
Here are the two versions:
This picture started out as a photograph of a crack in the street. The shape reminded me of a lightning bolt, so as an exercise, I processed it in Photoshop to enhance that freeling. Carefully cropped it, inverted it so the black crack became white, and so on.
The result is a little abstract, but I think gets the idea across of a lightning bolt striking in a field.
Spherical photographs provide rich ways of exploring remote locations and giving a “you are there” experience. But in addition to photographic value, they also offer an interesting metaphor for seeing our world more clearly.
To understand how the metaphor might work, consider the following illustration.
How we look at something affects what we think about it. We don’t necessarily see truth without some effort; we need to determine if our perspective is correct.
As a quick exploration of this, I took these pictures:
They were posted on Instagram with the left one visible first with a description that said it looks “like a little green campfire of a plant reaching to the sky”.
In this picture of a small flower, I modified the background after taking the picture in order to highlight the flower and to separate it from the grass below it. Mainly, the grass was blurred a lot and made darker.
I like the way it worked out – the flower seems to float above the grass and is definitely the thing that grabs your attention. The background fades away even though it is a lot of the image.
However, it occurred to me to wonder what was being ignored in the grass. Surprising plant shapes, some interesting bugs, textures on leaves or the dirt, and so on.
Given the nature of spherical photographs as encompassing a complete view of a scene, one result of this is that they are, by nature, interactive. Humans have a limited field of view and trying to present all of a spherical view in a way that can be seen all at once is only possibly by severely distorting the picture. So the only way for a person to see the whole thing is to interact with it, to look at only a part of it at a time.
For my purposes, it turns out to be useful to describe the different aspects of this experience.
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.
This is an abstract picture of clouds, processed to bring out how it made me feel, what I saw in the original scene. In the process of making this, new ideas came to mind, and I further processed it to enhance them. The process was like a conversation with myself.
The result was interesting, and I allude to some of the things I was thinking in the text that accompanied the post on social media:
Abstract. A line of trees being blown by the wind? Something else?
The thing is, I’m pretty sure that some people, or even most, don’t see it the same way I do. They may not see the things I saw, and they may also see other things. Those views are entirely valid, in my opinion.
Here’s a possible example of seeing more of what’s there. In this case, colors in a simple field of rocks. What do we see? What’s really there?