On May 11, 9:20 am, Gary Edstrom <GEdst...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Why do some people seem to have such a problem composing a picture
> through the viewfinder?
>
> Last year, I finished scanning every one of my father's approximately
> 5,000 transparencies dating back to 1951. During the process, I had a
> chance to really look at each picture in detail, although I had seen
> them all before.
>
> While my father was pretty good at composing pictures, there would be
> times he would hand the camera to someone else so that he could get in
> the picture too. More often than not, the picture would be VERY poorly
> composed. I have one where the camera was tilted at about a 30 degree
> angle, and you only see my dad's head down in the lower-left corner of
> the picture. This was not just a one-shot blunder...all of the pictures
> in the group are similar, although not as bad. The rest were
> recoverable after rotating and cropping the image.
>
> What is so hard about looking through a viewfinder? It seems so trivial
> to me.
>
> Gary
One reason is that we often see what we EXPECT to see. This is a
characteristic of human vision. The brain does not receive a
"photographic" like rendition of the external scene. There is a
fantastic amount of data compression in the human visual system. If
we think we are looking at a familiar object, we will see the
"object", not the pixels that make up the object. This is the origin
of so many optical illusions.
One result is that we do not see what we do not expect to see when we
look through the viewfinder. I myself have shot oh so many bad shots
because my brain ignored distracting objects that obviously must have
been in the viewfinder, but they were not what my brain was expecting,
so it tuned them out. Composing through a camera viewfinder is a
learned art.
In one of the examples given, everyone knows the horizon is level, so
it "sees" the image that way.
Now, unfortunately, because of some quirk of the vision system, it
does NOT do the same processing when viewing a print as it does with
the original scene, even when viewed through the viewfinder. This is
weird, in my mind, but true. Best example is when we see the scene
that has a non-normal color temperature. We do not notice that
coloration, but boy when we see a print, even a colorimetrically
accurate print, we really notice the color :-(
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