What you see depends on what you’re looking for

Our photographic consultant is fond of pointing out to us, with the help of books and magazines, the different styles of great photographers. Clearly part of the variation in the final image is in the subjects they choose: Ansel Adams is famous for mountains and landscapes of the Southwest, quite a different thing from a New York City street photographer catching an instant among people. “But,” he says, “put in exactly the same place, facing exactly the same subject, they’d still come up with different pictures. They just see differently.” Which is true, and much more widely applicable than he meant. Even the same person looking at the same scene can see something entirely different at a different time.  A simple exercise can show this.

Our astronomer writes:

Try this yourself. Pick a scene, something either so familiar you don’t see it at all any more (like the house across the street), or something completely new. As a first step, just stand in front of it for a few minutes, noticing whatever strikes you.

Now go around the block, thinking of something else. Then place yourself in front of the scene again with the intention to make a drawing. You needn’t actually draw it, or be any good at drawing at all; just decide you’re going do as good a job as you can of a freehand sketch.

Go around the block again and decide what to have for dinner. When you next face the scene, look at it with the intention of describing it verbally (or in writing) to a friend who lives far away. Don’t worry if you’re not an experienced novelist! Work out what you need to see in order to make the picture clear to your friend.

You can continue the exercise with more specific situations: your out-of-town friend is looking for a new home and has asked your opinion about this one; you don’t know the people who live there and want to deduce as much as possible before you ring their doorbell. But even with just the three basic situations I think you’ll be struck by things you notice and do not notice. For instance, I often don’t even see where the shadow of a tree branch falls unless I think of making a drawing (or a photograph). What you see depends on why you are looking.

We often urge amateur astronomers, those who actually look through a telescope to see something, to make a sketch of what they see. This is not in order to get an inaccurate picture, drawn by an inexperienced and probably untalented artist, of something for which we already have far better images. It’s to go from the first to the second step above: they will simply see more if they’re drawing it.

What use is this idea to you? Am I trying to get you to take a sketching class in order to see your world better? Well, that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Partly I want to caution you against concluding that, since the witness didn’t see it, it wasn’t there. And to realize how much your eye depends on your mind: there is no such thing as a simple look.