AV News 184 - May 2011
These latter two are merely the receptors which transmit messages to the brain
which then tries to make some sense of them. It is a good job too, that the brain
is left to interpret and modify what it is 'told' by these two senses because,
'Human kind cannot bear too much reality' !
About three decades ago my wife, Enid and I were going for the first time to
visit Sir George and Lady Doreen Pollock to see some of their work and to show
some of mine. Enid seemed anxious because she had never been to the home
of a 'Lady and Sir' before, so she asked me what she should do and what she
should say. "Just be yourself; do and say what you feel like doing and saying".
Shortly I was to wonder whether this was wise advice! "What did you think of
those Tape-slide Sequences, then, Enid" asked Sir George. "Well they were
alright really, I suppose, but why did you have so many folk walking off the edges
of some of your photographs?" I didn't know where to put myself! "You know",
said Sir George, "I hadn't noticed that before, but now you have said it I think you
are quite right, I must look at them again sometime." You see, 'Human kind
cannot bear too much reality'!
I thought to my self how gracious Sir George had been in his response to what
seemed to me like inappropriate criticism, but we, as a group of AV workers, have
always shown respect for right and proper criticism; it was just that I had not yet
realised this in my early contacts with the RPS AV Group.
'Education', three decades ago, was not like that! And most photographers I
knew disliked criticism and regarded this as abuse. But then of course most
photographers have no real idea of what AV is about.
Most photographers seem far too keen on 'too much reality'!
Back to just before Christmas 2010, I had placed 'Colour Wash' on the
www.beechbrook.com site as well as on my own site www.avpeter.com and
on www.youtube.com under av peter. I recently received an e-mail from a
certain John Smith in Cambridge (yes I believe that there are a few more of us
around - Ed!!) which, apart from congratulating us on the Sequence, seemed to
have some very important things to say. So I quote:
'I felt that I must write to congratulate you on your superb slideshow 'Colour
Wash'. In my view it is not only a great production but enlarges the repertoire of
what can be accomplished with the tools now available to us. I am strongly of the
opinion that the slide show is an art form in its own right but one in which we have
only begun to develop. I long to get away from the idea that a slide show consists
of a series of odd pin sharp pictures with a few clever tricks plus music that seems
to have little or no relevance to the visuals. I have wondered for some time why
blurred or out of focus shots can have such an impact .
I recently came across a possible explanation, I thought that you might be
interested and I give below my research notes on this.
Blurred images and the brain's reaction - report by John Smith
On page 38 of the 'New Scientist No. 2778', an article on seeing and
perception has, I feel, implications for photography and particularly for
slideshows, which I am researching. Susana Martina Conde is quoted as saying
that our perception of the world is a rough approximation of reality, we cannot
process everything that is out there, so we take short cuts, sampling only the
most significant parts of a scene, edges, corners and the contours of objects, the
rest comes from our memories and expectation of what should be there.
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