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Human Vision vs The Camera

So let's talk about the photographic vision here, and so this is developing the photographer's eye, just your understanding of what's going to make a good photo. And there's lot of things that we're gonna look at in here, and the first thing that I wanna go back and kinda draw a connection with is the way we see things with our own eyes, versus the way the camera sees things. And it is very different, and I wanna use some illustrations to show you some differences. So this is a age-old little illusion here: which line is bigger? Which line, to your eye, appears bigger? The red one, or the blue one? And if you know these types of tricks, it's obviously a trick: they're exactly the same size. And they look different here, and the photographic lesson from this is: background matters, all right? Surrounding subjects affect our main subjects, and because of the size of the surrounding area, it is an illusion as to how large our subjects seem. Similar type concept here: which one of these li...

nes appears longer? Which one do you think is longer? And obviously, the size of those arrows on the end of 'em are affecting our perception of the size of these lines. So what we see with our eyes, and what we think they are with our brains, is not exactly what it is. Our brains love to solve problems. Believe it or not, we like to inherently solve problems. When most people look at this, they see a white square on some circles. And this is not a white square on circles at all, all right? But your brain says, "This is what would make sense." If there was a white square on top of those circles. All right, we need a little bit of a audience participation poll here. I'm gonna ask you a question. And what I want you to determine, between these three roads is: two of the roads are the same, and one of the roads is different, so think about which road looks like it's the different road. It's either A, B, or C. And I'm just gonna have you raise your hand. Who thinks A is the oddball road that's different? Who thinks B is the oddball road that's different? And who thinks C is the oddball road that's different? Okay, we got a bunch of people not voting. You're not helping out folks. (laughter) So let's take a look. A and B are not the same. A and C are the same, so B is the oddball road. So actually there's a lot of you that got that right. And so the relationship of one subject to the next can really affect the way that we see that particular subject. There are certain types of patterns that our brains have a hard time processing. It's just complicated and it doesn't work out. When I connect all of these squares, are they gonna be concentric circles that are evenly apart? My brain says, "No, they feel like they're jumbled rings "that are a little bit closer on one side than the other." But if we were to put some colored circles, you can see those are nice even circles apart. But that is a confusing pattern to our brain; we don't like that. These lines are perfectly parallel. That I can assure you. But when I add these blocks in here, and you look at this back and forth, they no longer look parallel, they look like one of my favorite video games, Donkey Kong, if you remember that one. We have a perfect gray stripe right here, all right? But when we add, or change the background to a gradation, it appears that this is darker on the right-hand side of the screen and lighter on the left-hand screen, and I can assure you it's not. If I flip it around, it always seems lighter over on the left and darker on the right-hand side. And it has to do, the background matters. The background is lighter, and this subject in the foreground will appear darker in that case. One of the little pieces I've been using for some of the titles of some of my slides in this class. I've added a drop shadow behind this, but because of the change in tonality, it doesn't look like it really has straight lines on the top and the bottom. But when we bring in straight lines, you can actually see that they are. And so the different areas of brightness and darkness kinda hard for our brains to process. This one is definitely a very strange one. Square A and square B: which one do you think is lighter, which one is darker? And would you believe that square C is exactly the same tonality as both A and B? (giggles) Just doesn't seem right. And I'm not playing games... Well, I'm playing a game with you, but I'm not doing stuff behind the scenes on this. This is just the way it is. This is the way our eyes receive colors and tonalities, and things get mixed up. All right, this one's gonna be a good one for you, folks. Okay, this is a puzzle. And we're gonna put this puzzle together. And notice that we've created a triangle. And notice where those corners are. These white arrows will not move. I feel like this is a magician's trick, okay? The white arrows will not move, but we are gonna reorder this, and I want to see if anyone here can explain what's going on. You notice that we've created a little cubbyhole down here in the bottom. But look at where those corners are. They're all in the same spot. How did we create a little cubbyhole by just moving pieces around? Let me go ahead and move it back into position. The yellow one never moves at all. The other three do move. Doesn't make sense, does it? Kinda very hard for you to process what's going on. So here's what's going on. This is an absolute straight line, all right? And this angled line on the top of the triangle is not exactly straight. And these little slivers add up to fill in that little hole or space for that hole. And what this is telling me, as a photographer, is that we are able to determine vertical lines quite well. We are able to determine horizontal lines quite well. But we can't determine straight angled lines nearly as well. We're not used to seeing lines in that direction. And so we have to be a little bit hypersensitive about making sure our verticals are straight, and our horizontals are even. We talked about that in the composition section. And we're gonna be tested on it, coming up in another little section, to see how good you are at it. Thinking about the colors that we see, let's add some colors in here. You know, this looks really nice with our background colors in the room right now. Can we get a wide shot with the room? 'Cause this matches the background, it probably looks like the TV is invisible right here. All right, drifting from our point. These two colors on the left and on the right, do they appear to be the same color? They don't to my eyes. But let's bring 'em together and see if they are the same. They are indeed the same. And so surrounding colors, just like tonalities, affect the way that we see a particular subject and its colors. We have red on the top and red on the bottom. The red on the top appears to be a little bit darker. The one on the bottom appears to be a little bit lighter. Let's move the light ones up above, but it's all exactly the same, and it has to do with the surrounding colors. And so, if you've ever picked out paint for a room, or you've tried to pick out clothing colors, other colors around it, the color of lights that you're under, all of that affects the way we see colors. By switching those colors, we reverse where the light ones were and where the dark ones were. All right, I need your full participation on this one. This one you're gonna get freaked out on, but it's a good freakout, okay? I need everybody to stare at the white dot, and don't do anything but stare at that white dot. So what's happening right now as you stare at the white dot is that this red and cyan color are just permeating your retinas right now. Your eyes are becoming saturated with these colors. And in a few seconds, I'm gonna move that dot down to the two photos, and you'll notice something about those photos that are kinda strange at that point. So keep your eye on the white dot, it's gonna start moving right now. Keep your eye, and notice we're gettin' some oohs and aahs in here, folks. That means they have experienced the short little trip here, all right? And so there is a persistence of color that your eye will bring in. And I wanna do it again for you, but this is gonna be another, this is a really fun one to do. All right, so I have a black and white photo. And I'm gonna show you the negative color version of this photo right now. And I want you to stare at the white cross in the middle. And these colors are going to be saturating on your eyes, this is going to be called a negative afterimage, or a color persistence. So stay looking at the cross. What I am gonna do in a moment is I'm gonna switch it back to the black and white image. And if you keep your eyes... If you keep your eyes on the cross, you will see a color image. If you look away from the color cross, the image will go black and white. So what I recommend is keep your eyes on the cross, you will see a color image, stare at it for about five seconds, and then look away and you will see a black and white image. All right, we're gonna go from the negative, keep your eyes on the cross, keep looking at the cross, keep looking at the cross, are you seeing a color image? All right, now look away, and look back at the image, and you'll see a black and white image. This is... Our eyes are very different than cameras, and I wanna prove that through a number of mechanisms. And that, I think, is a good way to show you that it's very different than a camera. So the advantages of our human eyes are really great. We have a lot of things that we can do that cameras cannot do. We talked a little bit about this back in the lens section on the class. So we see everything that our retinas can see, which is this huge wide-angle lens. We have our fovea, which is where we read really fine detail. But most of our general viewing, remember our movie sitting distance, how far we like to be from the theater? That's more of our central retina. And so we get to view the world through multiple different angles, kind of all at the same time, processing different amounts of information. And so that's something that's very hard to replicate in a camera. I mean, yeah, you can have a wide angle, and a normal, and a telephoto lens, but it's just not quite the same thing as the human experience of being there, and looking around, and concentrating, and looking at the detail of different areas. And so it's just a different experience with that camera. Look at this image and be consciously aware of where your eyes are looking at on the particular image. What aspect of this image does your eyes kind of return to? 'Cause what happens is your eyes kinda bounce around a lotta different areas, but you kinda come back to certain areas that you look at over and over again. And how does that change when I change it to video? You'll notice that your eyes are drawn to different portions of the image because we are drawn to motion. Anything that moves is intrinsically interesting. And so, even though it's the same color, the same composition, everything's the same except for motion, we look at things a little differently. How do you look at this image in motion, versus the still version of trying to show motion? Now we've been bred, and have that instinct to look at motion. It might have, at one time, been to see if that's a tiger in the grass, and nowadays is that car moving down the street? Motion is very important, but we have to kind of separate that when we get into the world of still photography. Hard for me to replicate three dimensions here on our screens and so forth, but that ability of having something in the foreground, and middle ground, and background, and focusing our eyes back and forth, is something that's hard to replicate in cameras. I mean, there is 3D photography, but that's kind of a whole separate thing unto itself. And so we can try to replicate having subjects foreground and background and so forth, but it's not quite the same thing as the 3D vision that we have. The range of light that we can see with our eyes is amazing because our pupils adjust, and in fact the retinas in our eyes adjust from bright to dark scenes. And so we might look at this and see the mountain very clearly, but then if we looked over at the trees, we could look and our eyes would adjust for the shadows and see that very clearly. But with our camera, if you wanna take a single photograph, you kinda have to pick and choose which one works, or something in between and try to work with it later on. Limited capabilities with the sensors. And so you're gonna end up with situations that have very high contrast: very bright on one side, very dark in the shadows. The range of colors that we can see with our own eyes, the visible spectrum of colors, is greater than what we can get in our cameras. Most cameras come set to an sRGB color space. When you shoot RAW, you can shoot in Adobe RGB, and when you take your photos into Lightroom, you can adjust 'em so that they can print in a ProPhoto RGB spectrum. But that's still not as great as what we can see with our own eyes. And I've had times when I'm shooting really saturated colors that I just can't quite get the same color that I saw with my own eyes, and it's just not available on the screens, or on the cameras that I'm using it with. True of fluorescent foosball tables, neon foosball tables. The eye has a curved lens and a curved imaging area, the retina. Our lenses are curved in front, but our sensors are flat, and that causes a problem. And so when we shoot a subject straight on, it's gonna be working out fairly well, but if we shoot it at a angle, it's gonna be a problem. And this is why we have different types of projections on the map. The Mercator projector of the map, the world is round and we're trying to represent the round world on a flat surface, it doesn't work out too well, because in this example of the map, South America and Greenland are about the same size on the map. When in reality, Greenland is about the same size as the Saudi Arabian peninsula. And so it's distorting parts of the image that are off to the side. And so when we're photographing buildings straight on, things are pretty true. We have straight lines that are straight. But when we move off to the sides it's going to distort the image, so we have to be aware of this. Maybe we want to do it, maybe we don't want to do it. Now our lines are no longer parallel. We throw a soccer ball into the left corner of the screen with a very wide angle lens, it's not really round anymore. This is normal, natural wide-angle distortion. It's not that there's a problem with this lens, that's the nature of a wide-angle lens. And then there is the brain filter. What we thought we saw, and anyone who is working in the judicial system with witnesses and the police, trying to get accounts of, "What happened here?" And you ask 100 people and they all have their own story of, "Well, no, I was really close: "the giraffe was right there next to the car." What you think you saw versus what you remember. And there's a lotta things that are going on in that realm, and we don't have time to dive into the whole world of psychology. But there is a difference from what we remember and what we're actually seeing with our eyes. Now the camera itself has lots of advantages that we have talked about at different sections in this class. Obviously, the motion-stopping ability of very fast shutter speeds shows us things that we can't see with our own eyes. Gotta love those ears helping him fly. (chuckles) Those slow shutter speeds for blurring motion. There is an argument that has got a lot of merit to it, that this is not how water looks. This is a completely fake image of nature, as is this. Infinite depth of field. Everything from the very foreground to the very background in focus. That's not the way our eyes see. Did you know that we have limited depth of field? Just do an experiment: put your finger somewhere where you can focus it right out in front of your eyes. Focus on your finger, and you'll probably notice me behind it out of focus, if you stay focused on your finger. Your eyes only have so much depth of field. So this is an unrealistic way of seeing the world. Not everything is in focus; your eyes adjust as we need it. And so that is definitely a camera trick. So if someone is accusing you of camera tricks, you're probably just gonna have to say, "Guilty as charged." Any time you use a camera, you are using a lotta tricks. We can use really shallow depth of field to draw our attention into one place of the image. And we do have limited depth of field, but not this sort of limited depth of field. This is really manipulating the image to make it look very different than the way our normal eyes would look at it. Telephoto view of the lenses enable us to get closer to a subject that would not normally allow us to get that close. Obviously very important with creatures that will eat you. [Audience Members] (chuckling) The compression effect, making subjects that are miles and miles apart look like they're relatively close together. Yeah, they're fairly tightly packed in there, but not as tightly packed as this image makes it look. Heightens that aspect to it. The expansion. How big do you think this bush is? Wow. Not that big with a very wide-angle lens. So the expansion of a wide-angle lens. Yeah, this is a pretty big area, but using the right lens makes it look even bigger. The perspective of putting the camera in an unusual position. The low-light ability to just leave our cameras turned on, recording the light. Our eyes kinda have to pick up the light immediately and see what's going on. The camera, the sensor is like a sponge just absorbing light. Using a tripod and a long shutter speed of 15 or 30 seconds, for instance. Taking a color image and reducing it down to a black and white image. A black and white is a completely faked image. I mean, if you think about it, that's not the way we see the world, but it works really well in images. And there's a strong history with it too. When was this picture shot? The Shackleton Expedition? Or something much more recently on a trip that I was on maybe? Normally, we're not walking around the world with a headlamp attached to our head, lighting up everything we look at, and so adding that flash can really change the way that we see a subject in a photograph. And so it's a good tool. It's a camera trick, the flash. Simple camera trick. So there's lots of advantages to the camera, and there's lots of advantages to the human vision. Just be aware of each, and how they affect your photographs, and what you're gonna look for in a photograph.