Looking Closer
This is a picture of a plant that, at first glance, seemed to be dead. Maybe it really was, I’m not sure. However, a closer look revealed these little tufted ends, probably some sort of flower, so I took this picture. I think it’s interesting, like a little unexpected bit of elegance.
It’s also interesting because of the lesson it gives that we sometimes need to look closer at things to see their beauty, to see all that’s there. Photography is often about seeing, but it’s so easy to focus on what is easy to see, what would be obvious to anyone looking at the same thing.
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Outside the Region of Clarity
This is an example of limited depth of field. Only a narrow band is clear, and things become fuzzy when we move away from it. The further we get from the band of focus, the less we can see what’s going on.
In this simple case, it’s pretty easy to see that there’s not much going on in the fuzzy regions; we can infer, probably pretty accurately, that the same drop-covered surface extends in both directions and the result is just an increasingly smooth tone as things get more and more out of focus.
If there was more going on in the fuzzy areas, with vague lines and objects, regions of different color, and so on, then we might be able to guess what’s going on. Of course, the likelihood of being right diminishes the further we get from the zone of clarity even for a richer image.
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