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What You Perceive Is Not Always What You Think You See |
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Written by Alip
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Thursday, 12 March 2009 |
 Trying to capture qualities in a purely visual way is often difficult because what we perceive or feel, or even seem to see, about something is not always what we actually see. I'm discussing about the football play that is so clear to the eye but so minute a part of the field of vision that the film can not portray it the way it appeared. And I mentioning how cold and dead a play or classroom presentation seems on film photographed from the back (or even the front) of the room, though it might be a quite exciting presentation to those in the audience at the time.
Similarly, we have seen movies made from cameras attached to cars or peoples heads as they drive or walk about; and the way such scenes look to us is not anything like anything really looks to us when we walk or ride in a car. In a still photograph, we can get all kinds of terribly distracting things we never even noticed at the time we took the picture. If there are geometric lines such as the lines of the edges of walls and ceilings in the background of a picture, if we are at any but the squarest of angles or at some geometrically interesting angle to those edges, the room will look distorted and badly built. None of the edges will look correctly vertical or horizontal. A beautiful face outside in the noonday sun actually has terrible shadows in the eyes and socket area because of the protrusion of people's brows. But we do not notice that when we are talking to someone. So if they and their eyes appear beautiful to us, it is not just because of the way they look, or the way they would look if we painted or photographed them accurately. If we take a close-up head and shoulders picture, with a normal camera lens (for example, a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera), of an adult, we will get just enough distortion in the proportions between the nose, eyes, and ears that the portrait will usually be unsatisfactory though it may not be apparent why or what exactly is wrong. Yet, while looking through the camera's viewer the face will probably have seemed normal proportion to the photographer.
Part of the art or trick in film or tape or in painting is to get what we want to portray to "appear" the way it does or can instead of the way it actually would look if we just copied it. We need to capture an essence or a perception rather than a strict physical appearance. So we have to discover or decide what the essence or the perception is first; and that is not always easy. In portrait photography, one of the things that makes someone attractive sometimes is their personality, not just their physical looks; so in order to capture their beauty we have to somehow capture their personality. If we don't and they do not have much beauty in just their looks, we will get just a very unflattering and unattractive picture.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 11 December 2010 )
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