Looking up from the living room chair, the framed picture by chance reflected the reading light’s bright lampshade and nearby reference globe. Since lens, wall art, and the room lamp formed a perfect alignment, the effect is to put the lamp and globe into the golden picture frame. A different relationship of the three parts would give different results. The ghostly image might be out of the frame in part or altogether. So this happy coincidence of composition leads to the observation that borrowed frames, reflected subjects not actually located in front of the lens, and carefully juxtaposed compositions can produce a kind of serendipity; lending a feeling of amplified significance and turning an ordinary view into something more than that, possibly looking extraordinary for a moment.
By analogy to the experience of thinking and seeing the world or solving problems that come to one’s notice, perhaps there is a similar process of amplifying ordinary situations into something out of the ordinary. It could be one or more of these same properties – planned or serendipitous: fortunate alignment of elements to suggest a meaningful relationship (e.g. ‘halo effect‘ when juxtaposing A with B), or the increased attention that comes from a frame placed around the subject to detach it from the surrounding context, or it could be the effect of reflecting the matter from the nominal subject being discussed or wrestled with. In each case, alone or in combination, as in the illustration above, the result can be unexpectedly pleasing.
Dramatic light turns the ordinary into extraordinary; something of meaning.
Two things that human intelligence can still do better than artificial “intelligence” (brute force matching and algorithm sequences) are perceiving patterns and recognizing relationships between things on the surface and at symbolic or poetic levels, too. Along with all the other things that make a person “human,” this habit of seeing patterns and being tuned into the possibility of a relationship forming, weakening, or strengthening contributes to making meaning. Sometimes a person attributes meaning when none is there; or none is intended but some meaning is produced incidentally or accidentally. In this photo, the steeply angled cloudless light on this scattering of maple leaves in the morning causes some drama or tension that can lead a viewer to stop and consider if there is something meaningful; sort of like reading tea leaves, or interpreting the patterns in bird flight (augury) or indeed in studying bird entrails (auspices) like the ancient Romans would do.
When a pattern is strong or seems to stand out and cannot be ignored, even silence can speak to a person. The paradoxical song title, “The Sound of Silence,” hearkens to that sense of presence and meaning, even when no words are present. Signs and symbols and the thrum of the outdoors seem to express a kind of music. And the play of rhythm, chord architecture, lyrical line and so on can engage more than a dozen locations within a listener’s brain, according to functional-MRI studies.
There is an important tension between pairs of things: what a viewer sees by imposing experience and knowledge onto a scene and what the situation itself presents to everyone who is there, not just the person holding the camera. Likewise, induction and deduction are paired in tension: one is top–down (projecting a research question onto the scene) and the other is bottom-up (“listening” for clues from the scene to articulate a research statement). Similarly between asking a question and making an assertion there is an integral, organic relationship: “the sky is blue” directs the person to the subject and predicate being made about it, but so does “what color is the sky”? In the case of this photograph in this light and this pattern of brightly color leaves contrasting the ground, is the feeling of meaning (pattern or relationship that is present) imposed by viewer, or is it actually coming from the play of elements and with no reference to the viewer: is meaning really there all by itself, or only when a person perceives it? Metaphor is still another way in which the conceptual frame from one domain of meanin is laid over top of another subject: the leg of a table or a waterfall of music that goes viral, for example.
More than a year ago a radio program featured a couple of Norwegians who were adept at computer programming. As an experiment they took a pool of short phrases in English and paired them to somewhat abstract illustrative material (sunsets, rainbows, snowstorms, flowers) to produce an “inspirational quote mill.” It was not an experiment in A.I. but a test of the mental flexibility and habit of making (or finding) meaning that all people share. In other words, a machine program paired the words and image, but the human viewer injected or extracted meaning from the resulting material. Seehttps://inspirobot.me/
So the next time you stop to compose a picture, consider how come the subject and light and meaning come together just so and it then causes you to reach for a camera. Is it brain habit of detecting pattern and relationships? Is it your own preoccupations of the day that makes certain subjects stand out, but others remain invisible or without significance? Could it be the urge to make meaning when words overlay visual material, as in the InspiroBot, above. Perhaps all of these things shape what you see (and what you fail to see). In that case, it is well worth opening your eyes a little more and looking around before pressing the shutter release. That way the whole experience and what you learn from it could become even more meaningful.
neatly spaced sycamores catch the warm light of the May 12 evening
Patterns and relationships are the superpowers humans have that AI does not. Being able to leap from a word to a symbol to an image to a melody works well if you have a poetic streak, enjoy humor, can follow political persuasion in speeches, or are touched by emotional displays or religious glories. So this photo of a residential development from the 1950s and 1960s with mature trees lining the street at regular intervals is very eye catching, indeed. The effect is of a living, seasonally dressed colonnade; a sort of Greek temple by made of living wood instead of marble columns.
Since visual experience is so keyed to look for patterns are relationships, recurring shapes, colors, shadows, textures, and so on almost certainly call out for attention. Not to notice them is harder than just letting one’s attention be drawn to a scene so the eyes can wander across the composition as it presents itself in search of patterns.
the cloudless day at noon places the sun almost directly overhead to make these shadows
The bright light and contrasting door to houseside make this ordinary structure stand out boldly from the blue sky and green foreground and background. But, as with the repeating pattern of the tree-lined street earlier, here again the eye cannot avert itself from the pulse of repeating pattern here. Oddly, the measurement of the cladding is a thickness of perhaps 9mm (1/2 inch) or so, but the sun’s overhead position elongates and exaggerates the shadow to produce this view of shadows measuring maybe 2″ (about 45-50mm).
In summary, eyes and minds work together to notice patterns and relationships. Very often meaning is attributed to the moment of recognition or the sensation of significance: aha! here is something interesting, beautiful, rare, or worth sharing on social media! In both illustrations, above, it is the repeating pattern that seems remarkable. And even if the thrill of discovery is not life-changing among the many important things in the world, at least for the fraction of a second to compose a photo, everything falls into place and the moment is captured: it really is life-changing, if only for the briefest moment in the eyes of one person.
see2think 