Enhance!
Updated: Dec 29, 2021
I have terrible vision--I've always been extremely nearsighted and began wearing glasses permanently in second grade. They were bottle-end thick, tortoise-shell cat's-eye glasses (with tiny rhinestone accents) worn non-ironically because they were the style way back when. But the amazement I felt when I saw there were windows on buildings across the street that weren't there before! And words on the blackboard or birds in the trees. I could see!
It wasn't enough. I knew there were so many things I wasn't seeing--couldn't see. I begged for a Kodak Instamatic camera for Christmas (and my mother, bless her heart and her own affection for cameras, made it happen), only to be disappointed that instead of bringing my photo subjects closer, the wide angle lens made them smaller! It was a disappointment made worse by the week-long wait for the pharmacy to develop the photos and provide them as 2 x 2 prints in a crinkly paper envelope. I still have them, for what it's worth.
In college, a Minolta pocket camera about the size of a pack of cards with a telephoto slider button (with mountain icon!) got me excited about cameras again. But still not close enough!!
Soon after college, I found myself transfixed in the darkness of a movie theater as I watched Harrison Ford directing an invisible computer to enhance a photo. As amazing and overwhelming as Blade Runner was to a quiet little girl in a midwestern town, the thing that captivated me was the odd, but increasingly focused dialogue, with Deckard--and me--becoming more intensely aware with every click and motion of the machine:
"Deckard : Enhance 224 to 176. [a man's arm becomes visible] Deckard : Enhance. Stop. [the man's shoulder and wrist are visible] Deckard : Move in. Stop. [close-up of man's wrist] Deckard : Pull out, track right. Stop. [writing is visible] Deckard : Center and pull back. Stop. [arm and door are visible] Deckard : Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. [doorway and mirror are visible] Deckard : Enhance 34 to 36. [dresser top is visible] Deckard : Pan right or-and pull back. Stop. [mirror is visible] Deckard : Enhance 34 to 46. [blurred white object in mirror becomes visible] Deckard : Pull back. Wait a minute. Go right. Stop. [Zhora's arm becomes visible] Deckard : Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. [Zhora is visible] Deckard : Enhance 15 to 23. [marks on Zhora's face become visible] Deckard : Gimme a hard copy right there."
I had seen the future and I wanted it. How could I have such an option to enhance what I could see?
About the same time, I had another epiphany while watching a demonstration of the brand new Aldus Pagemaker 1.0 software on an original Macintosh computer. I walked out of that meeting in a trance. Although I was working in the publishing business, it was all still paste-up, photo development, and printing presses--available only to the few. I decided to take a risk and a new job with the demand that I be given high-end desktop publishing equipment, and although it took me a few weeks to figure out how to use the "mouse," I was able to use a Mac II to publish a 36-page magazine with black & white video captures, and then color video captures--one of the first in the country to do so. I loved zooming in to "blow up" those video captures, even as low res as they were. I loved adjusting the photos even though there was only a blocky histogram to do it.
But I still wasn't able to "get" film photography. I needed the trial and error, the immediate feedback...and the ability to "enhance" to see the real details. When digital cameras first became available, I jumped--starting with a 2mp HP camera from Staples, but quickly dropping it for an amazing 5mp Sony F-717--and I was hooked!
Many diversions led me to other careers and other "lives," but I kept taking photos. I loved taking wildlife photos (backwoods and backyard wildlife...) because I could zoom in and "enhance." And as I was able, I upgraded cameras to some pro versions--so I could easily identify "operator error" and learn from my mistakes.
Fast forward and I have been privileged to have used a variety of lovely cameras at 50, 60 and even 100 megapixels. More importantly, today's cameras have amazing speeds of auto focus and capture--unimaginable when I look back at my old Instamatic (with the melted flash cube). And software enables impossible enhancements--almost to the point of looking around corners at subjects not really in the original photo, as Deckard was able to do--or to easily replace the background to show something completely different.
I still take photos to see and show what I saw. I am not interested in editing to the degree that it's no longer what was actually there. But I love zooming in as far as I can get. And with today's cameras, that is possible with little or no editing.
I spent some quiet time this summer and fall in some nearby public gardens and discovered that there was a whole world busily working away in those gardens. Pollinators--birds, bees, butterflies, moths, and other insects, but most spectacularly, the hummingbirds. We only have ruby-throated hummingbirds here, and I feed them every year, but I had usually only seen them at feeders.
I am in the habit of shooting at high speed continuous settings, my lens typically around 300mm, wide open from f1.2 to 5.6 (hence the pun in my photography logo). I usually shoot without a tripod--"hand held"--which can result in shake and lesser quality sometimes, but I practice a lot with my technique and literally holding my breath. I have actually been faint after some extended sessions, but with happy results!
So even though I thought I was simply taking a casual photo of flowers in a pollinator display garden, I was thrilled to realize that I had caught a hummingbird at a natural "feeder." It was at a distance, but I could "zoom in" on the photo to see detail! I was immediately addicted and spent a number of days literally standing still for hours in the edges of the garden waiting for hummers to pass (and awkwardly smiling at other garden guests). I was rewarded with a number of nice shots, not only of the hummers, but also of other denizens of the gardens, including goldfinches, who I have a new appreciation for (watch for future posts!).
So, to end this very long-winded first blog...! I texted some of my photos to a friend in another state, and she texted me back a few days later. She is not interested in bees, but she IS interested in Blade Runner, and she understood right away where I was coming from: "Enhance!" she texted.
But then she also texted excitedly that, "You saved a life today!" A neighbor had been frightened to discover bees in her yard and was going to destroy them. But my friend showed her a photo of a bee I had taken (below) and said, "Look at how cute they are--they have little feet! And they pollinate the flowers!" The neighbor zoomed in and agreed, and she decided to wait and see if the bees were really a problem.
That is a cropped (zoomed in) portion of a larger photo, but it is not changed other than being cropped. I didn't mask out the background. It was evening and a hedge behind the flower provided the dark background, in part because I was shooting at a wide open aperture, which results in softness in front and behind the "slice" of focus--which I aimed at the bee's head. I would never have seen the dainty details without a camera.
So check out the photos on the site--and those that I hope to continue to post. Where possible, I may blog about photos that lend themselves to zooming in, and then zooming in some more. I don't have to direct a computer to select coordinates; but it is just as amazing, or even more so, when you think that the camera caught all that detail--everything the light touched--in a tiny fraction of a second near dusk on a quiet summer evening, where the bees were going about their own timeless business, just at a very different scale from me.
Comments