Project 5: Photography I Space Exercise 8: Focus and Exercise 9: Woodpecker

I’ve really struggled with both exercise 8 and exercise 9. I’ve spent a lot of time taking photos on several occasions and been largely unsuccessful with achieving the outcomes described.

Having been visually impaired from birth, I’ve grown up with the attitude that I can do most things sighted people can do as long as I apply my problem solving skills. Despite being registered blind I have stubbornly pursues the visual arts rather than conforming to the blind stereotype of creating 3D items with texture. I know my limitations - I will never be a portrait artist as I can’t really see facial expressions. Now I’ve run up against both a newly-found limitation and some information about how others see that makes me realise my sight is even more abnormal than I thought it was.  None of this has been easy.

For Exercise 8 we had to “Place your subject some distance in front of a simple background and select a wide aperture together with a moderately long focal length such as 100mm on a 35mm full-frame camera (about 65mm on a cropped-frame camera). Take a viewpoint about one and a half metres from your subject, allowing you to compose a headshot comfortably within the frame.” I was supposed to end up with the face in focus and the background blurry.

The course materials went on to note that “In human vision the eye registers out-of-focus areas as vague or indistinct – we can’t look directly at the blur.” I realised that the only way I can imagine this is by looking at photos with bokeh. Nothing in my vision is ever blurred. It may lack detail, but there is no sense of blur in anything I see. Perhaps this is due to my nystagmus, which is continually firing at and missing proper focus. But for whatever reason, my sight doesn’t equip me to see blur, except in a blurred image. Furthermore, I can’t see through my viewfinder whether a part of a frame is properly in focus. I can see it being more or less blurred, but the exact point of focus isn’t clear to me. In addition, my camera has no infinity setting so it has to be done by eye.

I’ve taken so many photos for both this and exercise 9, only to upload them and see on a bigger screen that they are not blurred/sharp in the right places. Many times I’ve uploaded photos, seen that they’re wrong, gone and taken more, uploaded them, etc. Here are the best I could scrape up from the slew of images for the bin.

For Exercise 9 we were asked to “ Find a subject in front of a background with depth. Take a very close viewpoint and zoom in: you’ll need to be aware of the minimum focusing distance of your lens. Focus on the subject and take a single shot. Then, without changing the focal length or framing, set your focus to infinity and take a second shot” and “Again without moving the camera, select a very small aperture (perhaps one stop above the minimum to avoid diffraction) and find a point of focus that will give you acceptable sharpness throughout the entire field, from foreground to infinity. Take a third shot and add it to the first two to make a set.”

Again I went on several occasions and took numerous shots and none of them were much good. These are the best I could manage.

It’s difficult for me to judge the effect of each composition. It seems that the first photo draws me very much to the foreground, the second is confusing, and the third is most comfortable to view.

Reflecting on these two exercises, I’ve found them both frustrating and demoralising, and they have raised questions for me about whether I belong on this course. Looking forward at the next Project, which is also a photography elective, the tasks seem, at an initial glance, less problematic. At the end of the day these are electives and not my main subject, so all I can do is learn what I can about my camera and myself and use it to inform how I use my equipment and inner resources in an ongoing way.