WYSIWYG

What You  I See Is What You Get

Hi - You're back ! I'm glad, share this thing would you ? I'm never going to get rich and famous without a little help. 

So you're looking at a screen right now and lots of little bits of light are getting bounced off of the back of your eyeballs from your device of choice. Look up for a second. (I'll wait)

While you were looking at the wall, or what have you, bunches of bits of light were being reflected off of stuff and ended up getting bounced right to the back of your your eyeballs too. Now, your brain was able to process both of those experiences without too much difficulty but actually, the little bits of light from the wall and the screen were way different things.

I'm not going too deep with this so bear with me for just a little bit more.  One way they're different that most folks are aware of (sort of) is that the screen colors are made up of red, green and blue bits. The colors we see on the wall however, or in a painting are blends of the primary colors. Just remember that. The next time you see a rainbow on the screen, it's all just a mix of red, green and blue bits.

I know a lot of people who just hate the idea of "doctored" pictures.  I get it.  "Shopping" is the same as lying. Even cropping just means you were to lazy to take a few steps and shoot just what you wanted to.  So they snap away and post their pictures on Facebook (or wherever) and know that they're real honest to goodness photography purists.

Just remember that when you point your camera at something and hit that button, you are not taking a picture in any kind of color.  You're just, figuratively speaking, recording a bunch of ones and zeros in your camera. The sensor has places that are mostly sensitive to the red, or the green, or the blue light and it records the image in such a way that you can reproduce something like the scene you were pointing at. It's already being processed at that point though. It simply has to be. Remember, if you're old enough, how fun the old ascii "text" pictures were ?  Snoopy calendars were super cool and all, but just probably wouldn't cut it today. (obligatory LOL)

So you have a huge gazillion pixel image ready to share.  The only thing is, nobody has the time to wait for slow files and Marky Z is cheap with his storage space. So Facebook compresses your file even more than jpeg already does. Fb also by the way "enhances" your pictures, to make up I guess for the mangling it does.  In any venue though, by the time anyone gets to see your "untouched" picture, it's already been processed more that you probably realized.  Unless you're shooting on film, the only question is who gets to mess around with it the most.

So - speaking of messing around with them - here's some example of my  messing around with one subject. Not a single bit of PhotoShop in the bunch either. I'm way too cheap for that. There might be just a teensy bit of tweaking via GIMP, XNView,XNSketch and FastStone Viewer though...

Three shots with different composition, ISO and aperture settings:

f5.6 ISO 800

lower ISO (top) f11 (bottom)

Those were to practice looking at something differently. By changing my position, it's position and my settings I was trying to "focus" on different aspects of the same thing.

In the next (and last) album I took one shot and looked at it in different ways. In the interest of full disclosure, I did "erase" a wrinkle in the backdrop from the next group.

So there are a few ways to look a something. I see this thing every day and hardly ever look at it. It's just there, ready for a hurricane or power outage, but simply just there. When I did take a look at it though, I had to think about it. How am I going to present it, printed, or blog, or faceboo ?  What am I trying to say. Is it sort of artsy or merely utilitarian. In actuality, all I did was to let some little bits of light bounce off of a sensor at a certain time. 

And the time was (then).  

But now it's time for #circleshapesmonday

#rustysunday