Eight Bit Vision
After photography club this last week a few of us went out for some food and beer and talk, and we had a great talk. We got into all sorts of things, from the technical details of using the back button for focus activation, to lighting setups with reflectors, to maximum sync speeds and how this can limit your lighting options when shooting outdoors…
One of the diatribes I got onto, something that I’ve been thinking about lately, was how refined your vision can become over time. I’m beginning to understand how a blind person’s hearing can become hyper acute, I see things now that I never noticed before, things that seem so plainly obvious.
It’s as though you gain the ability to see in higher bit depths. (Or not, if you don’t care for nerdy simile.) When you start out you’ve got eight bit vision, where there aren’t many tones between each color, with high contrast, losing detail in the shadows. With work you expand the depth, so subtleties that you glanced over before jump out.
I see patches of light that I would have never noticed, and I know why they’re there. The sun coming in this window and bouncing off that white door…
I’m excited to see how far this goes. Already I see with such greater acuity, I wonder what I’ll be seeing this time next year, or in five years.
