Seeing what you don't see

- This week on The Practicing Photographer we're featuring my nose. All right, if anyone has ever done this to you, gotten real close to you and taken your portrait with a wide angle lens then you know how unflattering this is. I actually volunteered for this, believe it or not, and I did that because I think there's something really valuable you can learn about this perspective. And that is that you see that perspective much more than you realize and it's that much more than you realize part that I want to talk about. I want you to do a little experiment.

You need to grab a friend so I'm going to call in Brittany here who has already agreed to do this very generously. It's a really easy thing to do. All you have to do is stand real close to each other and look at each other and I will give you one piece of advice here. Try not to keep them in focus the whole time you're coming in because you'll get a headache real fast. So we're going to stand right here and I'm seeing four eyes right now so I'm not focused directly on her. I'm focused a little bit behind. But I'm really paying attention to my whole field of view and as I do that I realize it looks very similar to what you were seeing through that camera.

I'm seeing a lot of nose and I'm seeing a pretty high forehead. If I step back her features flatten out to be more what I think of as she looks like. Brittany, are you seeing, do I look really weird? - (laughs) You look a little weird. (laughs) - Okay, it's more than normal. - Definitely more rounded off. - Okay, spherical? - Mm-hmm (affirmative). - Which is the kind of distortion you get... - Fisheye. - Yeah, yeah, and all of this distortion's not caused by any lens, it's just this is what the world looks like when you're really close.

Sorry about the onion-stuffed garlic caps I had for dinner. Anyway, thank you very much. What I find interesting about that is that for my whole life at various times I've been very close to somebody probably from the time I was born. I'm sure my mom was in real close. I only noticed about six months ago that when you're standing that close to someone it looks like what you see in a wide angle lens. Well that's just the nature of camera position. What I find really compelling about that is why have I never noticed that before and more importantly, what else am I not noticing? Our visual sense is very strange because we project a realm of expectation onto it.

We also have visual habits. We have ways that we are accustomed to seeing the world. I see Brittany and most everyone else I know from a certain distance. I expect them to look a particular way. And even when I'm in close I don't necessarily pay attention to what I'm actually seeing. That's bad news for a photographer. You need to be paying attention to what you're seeing. So I would invite you to try this exercise partly because it's interesting and partly because it's good to know what it feels like when your visual sense has been opened up like that because now what I'm curious about is what other habits and expectations can I break that are going to allow me to see things differently.

Because if I do that I will be able to better visualize what certain lenses are like, but more importantly I might start picking out subject matter that I never noticed before. We're photographers, we're supposed to be seeing and what this exercise will show you is that a lot of times you don't.