I’ve been fascinated by photography since young, noticing my father was always taking pictures of us kids.
As a teenager I borrowed his camera, a circa-WWII rangefinder 35 mm with a Leitz-Wetzlar lens. That lens company is now known as Leica, but it was not a Leica camera.
He took amazing photos. He was an artist, with an artist’s eye for line and form.
I had early cheap 35 mm film cameras in my early years
In grad school I bought my first SLR, the diminutive Olympus OM1. Took a lot of photos over the years. And have bought and used several 35 mm film cameras culminating with a Canon EOS. Subsequently entering the digital age with my first Canon digital SLR, all of 6 megapixels, using the same Canon lenses. Then with have had several mirrorless micro 4/3 cameras with an array of lenses, and most recently a mirrorless full frame Canon R5.
I also have had a number of small pocket-sized digital cameras.
Yet, now, take most photos with my 12 MP iPhone XS, I am way behind on my phone upgrades, but the cameras have remained the same. Until the upcoming 48 MP iPhones, not sure I need 48 MP phone camera, we shall see…
Back to seeing…
I am fascinated both by technology and the human being…
Photography shows us how truly impressive is the human act of seeing…
When I walk in my office each morning, I often have a feast of seeing the Rocky Mountains.
Sometimes, they are partially or fully obscured by clouds.
But, being Colorado, we usually have sunny days, and every day gives a different view…
This is one example of a morning view:
I also see this view:
And I see this view:
Very different from the camera, I see all these views at once.
This is an example of the miracle of human seeing…
We receive photons that activate receptors in our eyes, similar to a camera, but our brains can translate these in a much more powerful fashion.
It is only a matter of attention, which shifts our view.
How very different from the limited views of the camera!
The first photo is taken at 10x, the 35 mm equivalent of a 258 mm “telephoto” view.
The second photo is taken at an in-between magnification, the 35 mm equivalent of a 56 mm telephoto lens, usually labeled as a “normal” view.
The third photo is taken at the 35 mm equivalent of a 26 mm telephoto lens, known as a wide-angle view.
Now most of the gross information is present in the wide-angle view, but at a relatively low resolution.
The following is taken from the linked web page:
“The eye is not a single frame snapshot camera. It is more like a video stream. The eye moves rapidly in small angular amounts and continually updates the image in one's brain to "paint" the detail. We also have two eyes, and our brains combine the signals to increase the resolution further. We also typically move our eyes around the scene to gather more information. Because of these factors, the eye plus brain assembles a higher resolution image than possible with the number of photoreceptors in the retina. So the megapixel equivalent numbers below refer to the spatial detail in an image that would be required to show what the human eye could see when you view a scene.
Based on the above data for the resolution of the human eye, let's try a "small" example first. Consider a view in front of you that is 90 degrees by 90 degrees, like looking through an open window at a scene. The number of pixels would be
90 degrees * 60 arc-minutes/degree * 1/0.3 * 90 * 60 * 1/0.3 = 324,000,000 pixels (324 megapixels).
At any one moment, you actually do not perceive that many pixels, but your eye moves around the scene to see all the detail you want. But the human eye really sees a larger field of view, close to 180 degrees. Let's be conservative and use 120 degrees for the field of view. Then we would see
120 * 120 * 60 * 60 / (0.3 * 0.3) = 576 megapixels.
The full angle of human vision would require even more megapixels. This kind of image detail requires A large format camera to record.”
https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html
576 MP!!!
What a wonder is human seeing.
And, seeing is only one of our senses…
I like this example because it is simple and accessible…
This human existence is so deep and marvelous, and we are also embedded in this deep and marvelous, Earth and Universe…
Within all of our worries of war and climate change, it is good to sit back and savor the miracle of existence…
Namaste
