Uta Barth, detail from "White Blind (Bright Red)"

visual perception
n : perception by means of the eyes
[syn: beholding, seeing]

Create a series of 5-10 images that explore an aspect of visual perception. There are many possible approaches, but you might choose to investigate one of the following:

-- The range and limits of human vision.
-- Optical illusions, and their relationship to human vision and camera vision.
-- The similarities and differences between the eye and the camera, and/or the metaphorical connection between anatomy of the eye and the parts of a camera.
-- The particular challenges of the digital medium for human perception.

Sarah Borup

Among the definitions of perception are observation, mental image, concept, consciousness, and awareness of the elements of environment through physical sensation. In the medium of photography, perception can differ significantly between what the eye observes and what the camera records, sometimes leading to a degree deception and/or manipulation. In the article on Uta Barth, it is said that her work invites confusion, and I think that holds true to many images, encouraging the viewer to consciously (or subconsciously) project into the work. In studying the difference between the workings of the human eye and the camera, I chose to focus on how both function over a period of 15 seconds. In a long term exposure, the camera records the movement as whole, blurred image, documenting an afterimage. The eye, on the other hand, moves in rapid point-to-point motions known as saccades, combining many bits of information into a whole motion. As stated in ìFlesh & Machinesî, the ìbrain inserts/patches over these difficulties to let us imagine we are living in a stable world where we see and understand almost everything.î My work, therefore, explores these differing perceptions of the same subject and motion over a given amount of time by demonstrating a long exposure, a series of images capturing the step-by-step map of motion, and a group of photos to be viewed in succession that reenact the motion, creating a faux-animated format.

Josh Cerf and Charles Hale

Deceiving Perception

By breaking down the anatomy of the eye and its connection with the brain we were able to reconstruct a simplified model of the aspects of human vision. This was achieved using the precise placement of mirrors, lenses and camera apparatus. Our main goal was to explore how an image is processed from the point at which light enters the eye to how the brain interprets it into what we see. These images show how the eye can be broken down into basic components and the integral link between them to produce the final image. The components we focused on were the retina, the lens, and the brain. Our study used two convex
lenses acting singularly as a retina and an eyes lens, while the mirrors symbolized the final image in the brain. Though each photograph is unique on its own, in our series they represent the process of human vision. This series depicts the perception of the human eye.

Courtney Jones

It wasnít until recentlyóafter reading the article Flesh and Machine by Rodney Brooksóthat I truly began to evaluate the biological flaws of the human eye. I began to consider the way I perceive the world, how our brain has the ability to fill in the gaps of blind spots, how my perception of color begins to alter towards the periphery. What I found most interesting though, was how my focus tends to concentrate on one specific object at a time. Whether Iím speaking with a friend, looking at a street sign, or considering a work of art, my visual focus is completely given to the object of my attention, allowing the rest of the world to blur out, even if in the most subtle way.

It was this concept, the idea of a specific and limited focus, which I wanted to communicate in this series of photos. In an exaggerated way, these photos are denying the camera of its ability to capture everything with distinct detail, and instead adopting a more human perspective, where the focus is concentrated on one subject. This series is meant to illustrate not only the limitations of human visual perspective, but also some of the most primary differences between human and machine.

Xiao Lin

This series of photos are an attempt to show the range and limits of human vision. Within these images I try to address the way we perceive motion and depth and how these affect our perception of things. Moving images play a great role in all of our lives. People are very used to seeing things move on the screen and rarely question how that happens. It is because many of us are raised watching television and as children, we think that is natural. Depth is another major area of our vision perception that should be understood. It is difficult to show depth and so all of these images are displayed in a series of similar images to convey depth or 3-dimensionality. Note that some of the images require the technique of crossing your eyes to see a 3-dimensional image. These images not only try to understand depth and motion, they also question the acuity of our perceptions. Even when we look in the mirror, do we really see an exact image or ourselves? When we look at something, do we literally see what everyone sees? These are questions worth pondering about.

Benjamin Michalak

In the work we looked at by Uta Barth, I was interested in the ways in which she explored the reality-photograph disconnect, something I often think about as well. For a project aptly titled "perception" I decided to continue along in this vein--what else separates us from reality? How many things distract us at any given moment? When we look at the world around us, how much obscures our view? I began by considering photography directly: the first photo takes the classic idea of a still life (the subject of so many "realistíc" images) obscured quite literally by a camera. The second, a slightly more modern variation on the theme, a portrait viewed through the LCD screen on a digital camera. The third is the television, distracting two people who would otherwise be engaged in conversation. Next, a window is placed between viewer and subjectóas if grainy screen and dirty glass werenít enough, the blinds are closed (allowing in sunlight for the comforting illusion of the outdoors, but no scene from it). Lastly, a drive though the country (ostensibly to "look at the scenery") is filtered through the constraining frame of a car window and the vehicleís speed.

Duy Nguyen

-My first two photos explore an interesting effect that only happens on photo: lens flare.

"Lens flare is the light scattered in lens systems through generally unwanted image formation mechanisms, such as internal reflection and scattering from material inhomogeneities in the lens. These mechanisms differ from the intended image formation mechanism that depends on refraction of the image rays. For good optical systems and most images, flare is a secondary effect that is widely distributed across the image and thus not visible. But when an image includes a very bright light source, flare generated by a bright image region can have enough intensity to become very visible. The light produced by flare mechanisms superimposes broadly across the image, adding light to dark image regions and reducing image contrast."

Lenses with large numbers of elements such as zooms tend to exhibit greater lens flare, as they contain multiple surfaces at which unwanted internal scattering occurs. The human eyes, however, does not have multiple lenses like that camare does, there fore we do not see lens flares. By trying different lens and light source I was able to deliberately capture lens flares on my photos. Then I create a second image without the flares and put them together.

-My next two photos explore how we "see" with our brain:

Normally light travels in a straight line, when it reaches our eyes, the informations is recorded and sent to the brain, the brain then processes this information and interpret into images that we "see". But when light has to travel through another medium in stead of thin air (such as water, or in this case: glass), its path is bend and twisted, so when it reaches the eye, the information it brought has been distorted. That is things apprear distorted when we see them through water or non-flat glass like in these pictures.

-In the fifth image is a series of pictures of the same scene. From top to bottom, the objects are more and more focused. I want to use this picture to demonstrate just how amazing our abilty to translate light into images is.

-In that last picture, I took a picture of me shooting my "canon" in the mirror. Then I turn it upside down and flip it horrizontal so that the text in the mirror is readable. It is a basically a play on perspective and memory, an image which intially look right but when closely examined you realized it is an impossible picture.

For my perception project I decided to visualize the differences between a cameraís perspective and an eyeís perspective. To provide a comparison, I placed two versions of the same photo on one canvas; the first photo is the cameraís perception and the second photo is the eyeís perception of the same scene. Information I learned from the article ìFlesh and Machinesî was the basis for many of the decisions I made with these photos. According to the article, a digital camera has uniform resolution across its 35 degree field of view. However, as one can tell just by looking around a room, our eyes tend to focus on one object or one area while the rest of our field of view becomes blurry and secondary. This accounts for the unfocused areas of the eye-perception images. Also from ìFlesh and Machines,î I found that in our peripherals we have almost no color vision. With this in mind, I decided to de-saturate the peripherals of the eye-perception images while the camera-perception photos remained in color and uniform in resolution, just as the camera took the photo.

Emma Schwartz

There is a distinct difference between what the eye sees and what the camera creates. For this series of images, I chose to use the digital photography medium to represent what the world might look like through the eyes of a traditional black and white camera. In each image, the reflection seen through the sunglasses is what one might imagine the subject is seeing, only in a black and white negative form. The eye and the camera are two very different mechanisms, both created for the purpose of sight, but very different in their methods. This series of images is a statement about what the camera perceives in relation to what the human eye sees, and the concept of seeing everyday places and people through the lends of a camera.

Jennie Seidewand

When looks at the limits and capabilities of the eye, I found myself incredibly interested in the idea of saccades and the way our vision is actually made up of small pieces, glances, and moments of blindness. Yet we rarely seem to notice that the world we see around us is actually just many pieces stitched together. For this project, I decided to try and create images that reflect the way we seeópiecemeal, complicated, and with some portions rather undefined or unexamined. The faces here are made of many small images, each one taken at a slightly different zoom and focal length to emphasize a certain part of the face. There are whole parts of the face not generally looked at, such as cheekbones, which sometimes disappear entirely in these images, and instead are left to our brains to imagine or ignore. The images also have black lines running along the edge of each image, trying to capture that momentary blindness we face after each saccade. Overall, these images try to catch the ways in which our eyes do not see a whole picture but small frames which can never really take in the entire picture.

Diana Siegel

Perception is a slippery thing; quite literally. Images flash by our eyes, confusing our minds and ultimately, forces us to think. In this series I tried to bend the way we understand what we see in a photograph. Though the photos are all shot in the same area, they look incredibly different. They each have a source of light that casts different shades of color onto otherwise monotone walls. In capturing the same space from different angles and directions, I have altered the viewer’s understanding of the space. One cannot decipher the images and resolve them into a coherent whole without a great deal of thought to spatial relations (and an understanding that the images are from the same space).

In conceiving of this project I had a great deal of trouble trying to reconcile a three dimensional object or space into a flat, two-dimensional illusion. I immediately thought of the illusion of cubes where it is impossible to decide whether they are concave or convex. Though none of these images is of a proper three-sided corner, they each have a touch of the same concept. I have also changed the orientation of some of the photos which adds to the confusion when viewed.

Simone VerEecke

For this project I got my idea from our discussion in class on what perception is with relation to what the eye sees and what the camera sees. The images I presented are meant to create the illusion that you are seeing something there, which is not actually there, while also playing with the concept of what photographs are and how they exist in our world.

In one of my photos I used a glass to door to overlap the images of looking through the glass and looking at the reflection on the glass. In this photograph you can see into the carriage house lobby, and also see the Houghton courtyard reflected on top. Both of the images are perceived through the glass to create this overlapping illusion.

Lastly I did a shoot of four pictures where I used a picture of a current place on campus, and aligned it at that original place. This quirky juxtaposition creates the illusion of the photo actually existing in context and in space, thereby removing its sense of flatness. I like this illusion because by putting the photo in its place it gives it a sense of reality, but taking a photo of it takes it away again. In that sense, this project could go on and on by taking photos of photos of photosÖ (etc). What was also interesting about this specific shoot, was that how I saw the image and the setting align was different than how the camera did, so I had to make up for that by aligning the image through the viewfinder. Overall my project was both experimental and fun.

Jenny Zhao

For my visual perception project I decided to explore more than one of the different approaches suggested. Image 1, 2, and 4 is my approach of rendering the different limits of our vision. For my first image I wanted to portray the vision of someone who has a color vision deficiency versus someone who can distinguish colors.

Image 2 is an image of silver dollar flowers. Only the stem is in focus to illustrate how our eyes can only focus on one thing at a time.

Image 3 shows two versions of my room; it is early in the morning and the sun is streaming in. The left portion is a close representation of the eyes╒ view of the room while the right side shows the different ways one may manipulate an image by changing the shutter speed or other functions on the camera. I overexposed the image on the right.

Image 4 is another representation of the limits of human vision. In this case I was trying to portray the difference between someone who has 20/20 vision and someone who is near-sighted.

As for the last image, it was experimentation with size. I was trying to show that viewers might not be able to make out the size of an object unless it is relative to an object that is more familiar. The size of an object may be deceiving depending on how it is presented.

Yeasmine Khalique

In my first image I wanted to show how the human vision works. Like all of our other senses our vision is very much connection with our cognition. We see information in small packets which are transformed in our brain to stimulate a whole picture. In this photograph I choose to enlarge the eyes because they are an important feature in a figure, in my opinion eyes are the feature that is the most significant in terms of one’s interaction with a person and memory. I also choose to enlarge the details of the wood grain because although our eyes are not processing and seeing the fine details of wood, especially when we are concentrating on something else, our brain has stored information of what wood looks like and thus when we look wood we assume the details due to our storage of images in our mind.

The second image is another perspective on the idea that our minds are a storage house of images. When we are looking at a room, the section we are looking at is in focus while the sections in our periphery sight are blurry. However we are usually not conscious of the fact that there are sections of our view that is out of focus. This is because our mind fills in the gaps that our eyes miss. I choose to take connect several photographs of a room in full detail and sharpness to show that our mind makes up the images our eyes cannot pick up on. In addition I choose to align the photos at different levels to illustrate how our eyes work. When we look around a room it seems like our eyes flow smoothly from one end to the other, however our eyes actually make several jagged stops in order to collect all the visual information.

The third image explores the way we perceive ourselves. The way we look at ourselves is affected by several factors which the camera can manipulate. Photography in our modern culture has affected the way we view ourselves, it has the ability to change and provide illusion. We look at models and aspire to look like them, however we neglect to realize that there is a great deal of illusion involved in those images of models. The regular image represents how we really are; the concave mirror represents how we view ourselves once we start comparing ourselves to what we think of as flawless models. The camera and photography has the ability to change and alter and thus we should be careful to understand this before we become self-conscious.

My fourth image is an experimental image on how we perceive depth. There are many creatures that do not have any depth perception. Our eyes are intricate and allow us to estimate the distance between two objects. Also this photograph was an attempt to explore what happens to our eyes and mind when we spin around very quickly and stop. I have noticed every time I spin around quickly my depth is altered and my color perception is also a little off.

My last image is another example of the concept that our mind is a storehouse of images.