Asher Kelman said:
I get your points. There is no offense perceived!
Glad to hear it. Sometimes my rhetoric goes beyond what I inted.
Asher Kelman said:
You like detail and technique in pictures that is immediately understandable to you and gives your senses a "tickle". You have no interest in overblown images with little detail.
No interest is a touch extreme. I do greatly enjoy and appreciate the exceptional image. But without true greatness, I need more to hold my attention. Hence my point that there is an upper limit to acceptable print sizes based on the application. For all the the richest of us, homes are finite spaces. And as a print gets larger the viewing distance gets respectively/proportionally less as most people do not have space to get 5 m of viewing distance in a home (many large homes simply do not have rooms that large).
Asher Kelman said:
On the last point, most would share your view.
The eyes, BTW, are unintelligent sensors behind a lens, just like a CMOS chip.
Here I disagree. From what I have learned of engineers and physiologists study of the vison (I am still a neophyte) is that there is much more to vision than just eyes and sensors. Are you aware of
the distribution of rods and cones in the retina? Are you aware that the human mind then takes the RGBL (Red cone, Green cone, Blue cone, primative but hyper sensitive luminosity data from the rods) and then mixes this data together via a neural network into new forms? This is a moderately complex process using and the data is greatly modified from what the rods and cones sense before it reaches your conscious mind. Are you aware how highly correlated the spectral response of the 3 types of cones in the eye are? Are you aware of how wide of an arc of sharp vison the average eye has and how this is what leads to shifting content into the thirds points (placing a region of interest/subject far enough into a frame such that the linear border is outside ones arc of sharp vison allows the invocation by the viewer of suspension of disbelief so they can be absorbed into the
"reality" of the image)? Human vision is not a simple or trivial thing. It is not just a lens and a sensor. The sensor itself is complex and non-uniform. The measureable circuitry behind that lead to the conception that we do not see in RGBL although the eyes capture data in RGBL.
The first step of human vision is to generate an opponent model of the red and green data (a difference model) while the blue data is retained untouched at the first stage. Some evening while out shooting watch your perception of luminosity after the sun has set and the world turns blue. Note how it still seems bright enough to see easily outside with your eyes while your camera is stuggling to focus. Have you ever walked in the dark and seen your moonshadow? Have you ever been in the dark and had to rely soley on you rods for night vision? Nothing is in focus whatsoever. But even with nothing in focus my rods allow me to track a heron in flight at 20m. And what your rods sense ties in very tighly to your feelings. This ties in very tightly with primal fear. These tie ins of our vision is part of why our species survives before streetlights. It is part of why some children fear the dark.
The human visual system is a complex thing that ties in intimately with our feelings and emotions. Have you seen any of the commentary of why certain colors of paint on walls lead to statistically verifiable changes in human behavior. The human mind is not simple. The human mind is a complex collection of different systems doing many things simultaneously. Our consciousness is simply a bubble/excerpt of feelings at the top of this. Conscious perception and reality are not tightly correlated. The human mind works by leaps and bounds and our perception can completely miss the reality of what it feels/observes. There are many interesting phychological experiments that document this.
Beyond the physiology, when I say
a vision tickles the eyes, what I mean is that it strikes my pleasure circuits and makes me feel pleasure. It feels good. But I am very visual and I like to watch (most of the contributors here probably share this feeling
).
This is far beyond hot, cold, pressure or other things we feel with our skin. What the eyes create is a feeling just a real as love or anything else we feel. In fact, what the eyes feel is very much a real feeling.
There are also mechanical aspects to vision too. I have watched two copies of a plane fly across the sky on a dark night because I was seeing it in the peripheral vision of one eye and the sharp focus of the other. And that left me feeling wondrous.
Heck, just thinking over these ideas and concepts has left me in a state suffused with joy as the world is a wondrous thing to experience.
Asher Kelman said:
Eyesight is not a feeling, but a sense.
If you like the brush strokes that become shining chrome, great. I can like that too.
It was not that the brush strokes evoked chrome, but that what I saw was clearly different while feeling the same as the visually different reality that amazed me.
Asher Kelman said:
That, however, does not in itself constitute art.
Neither detail nor blur makes art.
I agree. I tend to define art simply:
Art is expression.
Short, simple, and leaving the door open for expression and interpretation by the viewer/perciever.
One of my favorite musicians is
Bebel Gilberto as I love her voice. Her voice is so pure. Listening closely one can hear not just the note but half a dozen harmonics of it sinking down her throat. (I do so love clear clean vocals.)
Asher Kelman said:
Still either or both, might be essential for a particular work of art to succeed.
Even to fully understand a work of art that merely intended to be documentary, such as a surfing picture, the photographer has to assume a basic education of the viewer.
If you don't know what a wave is or a man is, or have no concept of sport or fun, then the relevance of all that carefully included detail is lost on the viewer.
So all art, even clear, detailed, perfectly rendered art, depends on the viewer’s preparation.
Excellent statement/example. Very Californian (choosing surfing). Truth be told the only surfing here in the PNW is on the Pacific Coast and much of that is on nasty beaches in very cold water from the hearsay I have heard (I have never seen it, but have heard about the weather watchers who leave work early to drive to cast to surf a storm surge).
This image is another rarity in the region: skimboarding. Sandy beaches in the greater Puget Sound region are uncommon (too much shore stabilize to protect rail lines). Here on Whidbey Island is the only place in the greater Puget Sound region that I have seen such activity. The launching into air is a mixture of human motion, a strong inbound tide, a triad of outbound ships to create decent waves close to shore. I would not expect most people to be aware of this.
But, the misinterpretation (which is reasonable) brings to the forefront the viewers context. Mine is very technical and I studied computer vision years before I picked up a camera seriously. Truth be told it took me about 4 years to overcome my background and truly see an image for the first time. And I first seriously picked up a camera a little over six years ago. For context, I am young (33) and finished grad school about 8 years ago so I clearly still have much to learn and my tastes may change with experience.
Truthfuly, I expect my tastes to radically change in a decade as my understanding of images seems to evolve to a new level every 6 months. But even radical change is unlikely to change my emotional attachment to details.
Asher Kelman said:
So if something doesn't move you, that fine. However, it might just be that you are not set up to appreciate it yet or else, perhaps everyone agrees that the "Art" isn't!
I agree. 200 years ago the fictional novel was unheard of or very new thing. They began as travelogues and were respendent in detail to immerse the reader in the reality of the thing while rather sparse in narrative moving the story forwards (Brahm Stoker's
Dracula is a good example). While painting is likely 15 or 30 thousand years old as an art. And including the oral narrative, we have the fact that both the novel and the photographic image are young aspects of ancient arts. But, ancient or not, they are always filtered through the perceptions of the living and what they have experienced. I do not retain being unable to tell if a house's trim is a 6 or 12 inches wide a block away (150 m) as part of my visual history. Instead, those early years before I wore glasses are lost as visual history beyond arms reach for me. And I have always been fascinated by looking closer.
This is not to say I do not appreciate a great composition regardless of the media. But for the 99.8% of what is out there that is not trancendentally fantastically composed I need more than that. And reality is a great source as mother nature seems to be one up on any human creation nearly without fail.
enjoy,
Sean