From the course: Photography Foundations: Composition

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How your camera is not like your eye

How your camera is not like your eye

From the course: Photography Foundations: Composition

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How your camera is not like your eye

If you're watching a composition course I assume it's because you've already recognized that seeing how to arrange the real world into a good photo is not easy. In fact, seeing is not easy. Now that may sound strange, given that you walk around the world using your eyes all day long, but as we'll discuss throughout the rest of this chapter, learning to really see the world around you can be difficult, and one of the reasons that it's difficult is because of the way your visual system is constructed. Now it's easy to think of the camera as like a mechanical eye, but that comparison really doesn't hold up under closer examination. Yes, like your eye, your camera has a lens and an aperture and a light-gathering medium. It has a particular dynamic range, a field of view, it's subject to the laws of optics, and so on. But your eye differs from your camera in one extremely significant way, and that's that it has a human brain attached to it. Now it's tempting to think of the brain as simply…

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