Time enters in photography most blatantly by setting your camera. How long are you going to expose this picture? Just looking at my practice, I see that I shoot most things in the 1/125th -1/250th of a second range. Does my eye see that fast? No!
Movies are a sequence of still pictures that scroll before your eyes at a rate of 50 frames per second and give you the impression of continuous motion. Human eyes can’t see faster than this. Our brain reconstructs the information missing between a frame and the next and builds the illusion of motion(1).
The first big lie that photography tells us is about time. Photography can leave us with the inability to distinguish the speed at which people and objects were moving when the photo was taken. How can you tell if a photograph of an apple on a table was taken in 1/60th of a second or with a long exposure of 2 minutes?
Would “true” photographs only be taken at the speed that our eyes and our brain use to see the world, or more poetically at the speed at which our heart beats?
We observe a scene happening before our eyes, we keep the detail we are interested in, by focusing our eyes and moving them and moving our head to grasp the decisive or interesting elements of scenery or an event while discarding the rest(2).
If I take photographs of people walking with a speed of 1/60th of a second, people will be most likely blurred. Thus the photograph will miss the detail that the photographer might have found interesting, say facial expression of a passerby, while the background would be sharp. An inversion occurs: the eye of the photographer perceives an interesting person walking and the street doesn’t really matter, while the photograph shows a sharp street with a few blurry people walking.
If the shutter speed is fast enough to freeze the action, assuming that everything is sharply focused, another representation of reality is present: people, streets, cars, and building will all have the same hierarchy in the frame. The viewer can decide to dismiss the people walking and look at the garbage bins or do exactly the opposite. It is a democratic view.
Democracy, also in the realm of photography, consists in the illusion of having a choice. It’s only an appearance.
(1) In an experiment two blinking lights were shown to a certain number of people. If the frequency of the blinking and the distance between them was right, people would perceive the two moving lights as a single moving light. If the two lights had different colors, then people would see a single light moving and gradually changing color. The most interesting part is that people would perceive the intermediate color before the second light would turn on.
(2) Our eyes perceive detail only in the fovea (the high resolution part of the retina). The detail we see is constructed by the brain, stitching together several images taken by the fovea at different moments of time.
Time enters in photography most blatantly by setting your camera. How long are you going to expose this picture? Just looking at my practice, I see that I shoot most things in the 1/125th -1/250th of a second range. Does my eye see that fast? No!
Movies are a sequence of still pictures that scroll before your eyes at a rate of 50 frames per second and give you the impression of continuous motion. Human eyes can’t see faster than this. Our brain reconstructs the information missing between a photogram and the other and builds the illusion of motion(1).
The first big lie that photography tells us is about time. Photography can leave us with the inability to distinguish the speed at which people and objects were moving when the photo was taken. How can you tell if a photograph of an apple on a table was taken in 1/60th of a second or with a long exposure of 2 minutes?
Would “true” photographs only be taken at the speed that our eyes and our brain use to see the world, or more poetically at the speed at which our heart beats?
We observe a scene happening before our eyes, we keep the detail we are interested in, by focusing our eyes and moving them and moving our head to grasp the decisive or interesting elements of scenery or an event while discarding the rest(2).
If I take photographs of people walking with a speed of 1/60th of a second, people will be most likely blurred. Thus the photograph will miss the detail that the photographer might have found interesting, say facial expression of a passerby, while the background would be sharp. An inversion occurs: the eye of the photographer perceives an interesting person walking and the street doesn’t really matter, while the photograph shows a sharp street with a few blurry people walking.
If the shutter speed is fast enough to freeze the action, assuming that everything focused, another representation of reality is present: people, streets, cars, and building will all have the same hierarchy in the frame. The viewer can decide to dismiss the people walking and look at the garbage bins or do exactly the opposite. It is a democratic view.
Democracy, also in the realm of photography, consists in the illusion of having a choice. It’s only an appearance.
(1) In an experiment two blinking lights were shown to a certain number of people. If the frequency of the blinking and the distance between them was the right one, people would perceive them as a moving light. If the two lights had different colors, then also a shift of the color was perceived. The most interesting part is that people would perceive the intermediate color before the second light would turn on.
(2) Our eyes perceive detail only in the fovea (the high resolution part of the retina). The detail we see is constructed by the brain, stitching together several images taken by the fovea at different moments of time.
