NPR - Perception and Reality

Perception and reality? What we think we see and know from our experience is based on just that, our perception and understanding of reality. Or so we think. Some psychologists tell us our lives are just an illusion. We live in our own world in a greater world, and don't really see reality, only our view based on our knowledge, experience, education, and so on as we go through the world.

What we process in our brains is just a fraction of a percent of what we actually see. What we process and store in memory is still only a fraction of that. And what we remember over our life is even a fraction of that. And what we remember isn't complete, it's snippets of a novel, like keywords in a blog, and our brain recreates the event, place, person, emotion, and so on, each time we recall it or remember it accidently (those sudden realization moments).

The photographer isn't any different in our perception of the world. We only use a camera to capture what we think we see and try to produce images to make it interesting. Sometimes it's not perfect or what we really wanted, or even what we think we saw. Cameras record images differently than the human eye. Film is closer to the human eye, but each type of film has it's own characteristics. Digital is completely different, which is why it's harder to learn, and why some digital images look artificial.

I raise this because I try to make my images what I see, but all too often come out different. Like I should have known, but it always suprises me, especially when it does come out the same as I remember. And that's the difficulty with photography, the photographer isn't paying attention to the world anymore, but their camera perception of the world to see and capture an image. It's an illusion of an illusion in some respects.

And the point? Not much, just wandering along and thinking, partly from a friend's e-mail, to see how we see the world and interpret someone else's view of it, and our decisions in life.