I haven't used motion blur in my photographs for a while, but today I tried it out, and I think the results are good. At least they feel interesting. Perhaps this is because of how our visual system works in reality: we see little of the world sharply, most of it is unclear and blurred at any given moment.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Blur - less is more
Friday, May 20, 2011
Feast of flowers, blindness of people
It seems that we are having a feast of flowers, more than usually. Maybe it is because of the long and warm summer last year. Of maybe this is just a caprice of memory; the long winter smudging up memories of summer.
Speaking of memory, there was a provocative article by Graham Lawton in New Scientist (May 14, 2011), titled The Grand Delusion: "From your senses to your memory, your opinions and beliefs, how you see yourself and others and even your sense of free will, things are not as they seem."
Lawton's article uses human visual system as a key topic to demonstrate how strange our brain is, and how we really don't know (and in fact can't really know) how the brain fools us.
We have an impression of living in a continuously updated colored visual world, but analysis of the visual system shows that this is an illusion created by the brain: most of what we "see" is actually a simulation created by the brain - the bandwidth of information from the visual system is quite small, and not continuously updated. In fact, our visual system is offline (while we are awake) for about 4 hours each day, without us noticing anything being wrong. And then there is the matter that we see in monocrome except for a really small part of the field of vision.
And then is the fact that we are completely unaware of the biased way we see the world. For example, our memories are to a large degree fabricated forgeries - we use memory as a tool to predict the future, not to preserve the past. Furthermore, we are able to see that other people are obviously biased, but we are fundamentally unable to notice that we are also biased to the same degree.
Fooling ourselves, that is what we are doing all the time. In fact, that seems to be the main occupation of humankind.
Bird cherry - end of spring, start of summer
This is a posting containing photographs of just one thing: bird cherry (Prunus padus) in flower. For me, bird cherry is the sign of summer being here. And especially the scent of the flowers, that is the thing.
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