----- Original Message ----- From: <Photogonow@xxxxxxx> : I believe all photographers would like to record any event at 'f/64 - ASA 12 : - maybe even 1/4000 of a sec.' but that is not the reality, and to decide : -NOT to take the shot- only leaves us in a world of EV 16-20! The True Human : condition does not always Expose it's self at those light levels. : : I believe it is the Technology that is still behind the 'learning curve' - : not the Imagers! I think from memory the human eye has an effective aperture range from about f5.6 to around f16, we supposedly 'see' at 24 frames per second.. this would suggest our eyes were pretty limited in seeing until you key in the perception issue, and recognise the memory builds a lot of what is 'seen' to allow what the mind perceives as redundant from being continually re-examined. but the eye is not a camera, and a camera is not a selective, synapse based memory device. then again, we have all agreed in the past that photographs produced by cameras are shadows of the real world and NOT reality (except in a relative sense ;-) As a pictorial device I have found blurs pleasing, I have found 1/4000 of a second shots informative - but they may never represent what I *saw* at the time - however, I can still translate these representations with my mind. Consider the facial expressions captured in some shots - the weird contortions that result from a face animated during conversations. They were there at the time, but the reality is that these fleeting transitions between one expression and the next happened to be trapped by a shutter speed that exceeds our temporal perception. In the book The Dark Summer, the author, Bob Carlos Clarke makes the observation in the prologue that although the series of images took place across quite a long span of time, the images in the book capture less than a second in time. I found that poignant, and it has been a thought that's stuck with me ever since. Since we mentioned audio before it's probably OK to draw a comparison to that too. Words are complex, the sounds made are sometimes quite subtle and distinct - voice recognition programs often have heaps of problems with accents, yet we can hear and interpret barely articulated, accented, screamed words though massive levels of ambient noise. Our mind & memory does a *lot* of the perception when it comes to using our somewhat limited senses to perceive the world around us. the technology is already here, but at this stage it's largely the domain of an organic, lucid and perceptive mind. A shame the recording device is often prone to fading ;-) k
