[Leica] BLUR - My last words.

[lrzeitlin at aol.com (lrzeitlin at aol.com)]

 Forget about all that nonsense about flapping hummingbird's wings and 
moving fan blades. You can't see speeding bullets either. If we were trying 
to truly depict reality, any photo which shows a hummingbird's wings clearly 
is false. George Lottermoser sums it up best by saying:
"two dimensional visual art relies on convention, creativity and technology."


Any two dimensional photo is an artifact which requires considerable 
learning to interpret. Most discussions of photographic "truth" tend to 
obscure the fact that ALL photographs are abstract representations of an 
external world. When Margaret Mead showed Tahitian natives black and white 
photographs of themselves and their village, they rotated the photos this 
way and that, shook their heads, and handed them back. "Nice designs", they 
said, "but what are they?" Mead then realized that photographs were such 
abstractions that only long experience enables their interpretation.


Closer to home, your dog does not jump into the TV screen to frolic in the 
fields shown in the dog food commercials. Neither does it growl or flee from 
the TV intruders in your household. The image on TV is not the real world to 
the animal but a flickering pattern on an illuminated tube. We see the image 
as a depiction of reality because our intelligence and experience enables us 
infer the scene from its abstract representation. The animal does not.


The article that George cites is the best short piece I have seen on the 
depiction of motion in art. Read it.
http://www.sophia.org/tutorials/elements-of-art-movement-and-time


My comments are based on the feeling that most LUGGERS are so immersed in 
two dimensional image making that they assume the learned conventions of 
photography represent the world as seen by the human eye. I am nearsighted. 
When I remove my glasses EVERYTHING is blurred. When I wake up in the 
morning am I to assume that the world is in violent motion which stops the 
moment I put on my glasses?


I am not a zealot on the topic. If you look at my own submissions to the 
Motion contest, you will see that I use both techniques, blur and content, 
to imply motion. Horses for courses I say.


<http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/Larry+Z/Dive_001.jpg.html>
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Larry Z