(Re)Learning to See

For someone who is new to the visual arts, an important part of the process is learning (or re-learing) how to see what’s in front of you. I had a brief taste of this when I took a four week drawing course as a junior in college. My drawing skills went from bad to slightly more informed bad, but one of the things I learned is that what we think we see and what is really in front of us are quite different. Long story short, the brain does a lot of editing for us on the fly, and while that may be useful for navigating daily life, it’s not so good for the arts.

At first, you might not think this applies to photography, and it certainly doesn’t apply quite the same as in something like drawing, but it is still a factor. Who among us has used a camera and not realized until looking at photos long after the fact that there are objects in the scene that you never noticed and probably wish weren’t there. When looking through the viewfinder the brain tends to edit out everything that we’re not focusing (mentally) on. I’ve had plenty of pictures spoiled by a random piece of trash in a gutter, or some strange object appearing to sprout from the head of my primary subject.

Fine. But yesterday this was driven home again in a new form. I’m getting better and looking at everything I see in the viewfinder, but everything has to mean EVERYTHING. Those of you in the Boston area may have noticed that we had a fairly brilliant sunset on Monday. I got home just as it was about to fade, and wanted to take some photos out my back window….I’ve been eyeing the tree/house skyline back there for a while and thinking it could make a nice dark foreground to an evening sky. In my haste, I forgot that my prior use of the camera was in a band/club setting. That setting had about zero light which means I was on a high ISO, and I forgot to check the setting before shooting my sunset. Of course, among the many pieces of information available to me in the camera viewfinder is the current ISO setting, but I never even looked at it. I composed, shot, liked what I saw on the back of the camera, sat down to watch MNF and didn’t realize my mistake until the light was long gone. The shots aren’t terrible, but ISO noise from shooting at 6400 instead of 200 isn’t exactly what I was looking for.

There are so many things to think about while operating a camera….someday I’ll do them all instinctively. For now, photography, like the rest of my hobbies, is often a humbling experience.