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11/5/11

Sometimes What We're Seeing

Isn't what is really happening at all...

Perception is not reality since there is obscurity in motion.

It's interesting how the human eye and mind capture what is happening around us and makes sense out of it when we are in motion and the objects around us are simultaneously in motion. The camera operates in stop motion, what you record in that millisecond is the fact that is happening at that brief moment in time. As we're driving in one direction the car speeding by in the opposite direction is presented in such clarity we may instantly recognize the make, model and year.



While we're chasing that bus we had wanted to catch that has pulled away from the bus stop our minds are racing and thinking "there goes my bus!" Although are thoughts are likely muddled the image of the bus appears in our minds eye with absolute clarity. We may be in a state of panic, our hearts racing and our thinking illogical but the image of that bus is clear in our head.


Photographic equipment doesn't have a complex network with the capacity to sort out all the components of the image it sees and grasp the full meaning as the human brain does. It is a piece of technical equipment that merely observes and records that instant what exactly appears to the digits that compose the picture. If the camera is in motion when the shutter is snapped it archives a methodical perception rather than one that deciphers and makes sense of it in human reality. We can alter the picture afterwards to another valuation but it is remains the original capture reorganized by manual intervention for a different comprehension.

Perhaps sometimes I do think too much. This observation about what human consciousness perceives and cognitively reorganizes what the eye intakes, along with our other senses and reorders it in a highly developed recognizable form makes me wonder about common phrases. For example "Perception is reality" and "It is what it is." If a piece of technical equipment states what is in front of us in a "real" way and our highly developed brain perceives it in a logical order that makes sense to us it seems to me these phrases are inane.