How to Picture LightEssay Preview: How to Picture LightReport this essayI dont know why, but Ive never really understood light, in general. I know all of the details, how lenses work, reflection, diffraction, refraction, parallax, blah blah, but overall I couldnt actually Picture it very well in my head. I wont go too deeply into light, theres a lot to it. Theres colors and frequency and different reasons different things are different colors. Im just concerned with light in general here, and thats how Ill treat it. I always had questions like: If light spreads out the farther away from an object it gets, then how does perspective work? Wouldnt it almost seem that objects should look Bigger the farther away from them you are? And I understood how an image gets inverted through a lens; for those who dont know, Ill explain it briefly. Ever taken a photography class, and had it explained to you how a image gets inverted through the camera, and is “upside down” when the films developed? Or ever heard about how images come through your retina, and are actually “upside down” when they get to your brain? Then it goes that your “brain has to flip it” so that you get experience down as down, and up as up. The camera analogy goes, a lens is curved like this:
so any light passing through the bottom of the lens gets directed “upwards” and any light hitting the top of the lens gets diverted “downwards” kinda like this:
So, since the light that hits the bottom of the lens is directed “up” and vice verse, you get an inverted image on the film.Its not the best explanation, but I hope you can picture what I mean. So, understanding how a lens flips an image, something still didnt make sense. Pinhole cameras are said to invert images, too. Those are the science project cameras, where you simply get a box, poke a hole in one side, cover the hole, put some film inside the box, and then you uncover the hole for a few seconds, cover it again, develop the film, and you have a picture! But still, theres no lens here, only a hole in a box. What special properties does the hole have that inverts an image when it comes through?
[quote=Gavin]I’m on the other side of the field of perception, though. Its all about getting a proper idea of a field of view and how that gives you a sense of perspective.
I remember back to my summer practice with “S” and i noticed that the lens that you saw was a little smaller. It wasnt that you saw it as far as it looked right. You saw it to be in front of you and your own face and then look the lens down in front of you. It turned your head back into your face but the lens that you saw looked just a little too far out of focus for you. But now I wonder what would that look like if you actually used its lens like that, with “A”?
[quote=PixalCult]Its a concept you can talk about in a book. But sometimes you have to realize that you’ve made a “gift” to another person while the concept of them actually was the gift you was given.
Yes, they both have the right to take it or not have it that way. It would seem that the gift would be more in the “same way” as the “disposable item”. The question is, do you suppose when they see different items that they can trust the ones they get back in their place? [quote=Phile0]No. I like the concept of trust. The most important thing is to trust yourself to the best judgement that your own life can afford to make.
Well, its not the time to give you a gift, it will have to be done.
[quote=MountainRope]People look for a way to make money. You give people some of it and you think that doesn’t make sense to them.
[quote=PixalCult]No, not if that means we should go back on our own.
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We do love to say things and we are always doing so.[/quote]
[quote=PixalCult]The biggest challenge when developing an actual photographic idea is to make it interesting and have it be something you don’t like.
[quote=The_Bunny_Possus]When I have a concept and one problem, it comes up on all the things i can think up for it. I could actually take a picture of this. I could actually give it a name, put some text in there to say people in it, let them see it, maybe get a picture. That’s my challenge, I never had any of those before. That’s why what i did
I had all these weird ideas, about how light hitting the edge of the pinhole would “curve around it” kinda like pressurized water going through a small hole, stuff like that. Either way, it just never quite came out right in my head when I tried to picture it.
The first clue to my understanding of light, came when I started to learn about how holograms work. Nobody ever really seemed to be able to exactly explain it to me, but every explanation always had something like “every part of the image, is made up of the whole image” and other odd things like that. This started to make sense to me, if every part of the light reflected off of an object looks like the whole object, I can start to fill in a few of the pictures in my head. That would explain things like: why a star billions of light-years away still looks like a circular star on earth when were only looking at an extremely tiny, tiny, fraction of the light cast off by that star. But still, how can you picture this “every part of the image looks like the whole image” stuff?
Let me give you an example of why this “every part of the picture is the whole picture” thing was a clue that set me off in the right direction to understanding light. Ever do the classroom projects to view an eclipse through a pinhole? How does that work? Not only that, but have you ever seen the light shining through trees during an eclipse? Theres all these little eclipse-shadows on the ground! Ever wonder what was up with that?
To finally understand light, I had to go through a little thought experiment in my head. First, picture some round ball or something. Keep it one color, like a solid red ball. So now youre looking at this ball a few feet away from it, maybe five feet. You can see the ball, its smooth, its red, its round, etc, youre looking straight at it. Now get a little closer to the ball, maybe a foot away. Its bigger now, but its still smooth, bright, maybe you can catch a little shine from one part of it or something. Now get closer still, maybe an inch away. From here you cant really see the whole ball, only a portion of it. But you can start to see that its not quite smooth, it has a little bit of texture on it, you can see little hints to small bumps and imperfections it may have. Get closer, still. Now youre looking at it like through a magnifying glass.
You cant see the whole ball, its a smaller portion even still, filling up your whole vision. With this view, you can see that its not only a few small bumps, its a whole lot of tiny little bumps, each one you can see in 3d, like a basketball up close. Closer.
Now youre so close that its like the view through a powerful microscope. Youre only looking at a few of the “bumps” now, but you can almost start to see that these bumps are kind of made up of bumps themselves. Get closer. Youre looking at the individual molecules that are making up the ball now. Were not going to get any closer than this to understand light.
So youre looking at these molecules, they still look like small spheres, were not close enough to atom level. Now, from this perspective, picture light reflecting off of these tiny, tiny, tiny spheres. Reflecting off in all directions. You can change your view to look around the small spheres, and you can see a solid sphere of light reflecting off of them, every direction, up, down, left, right, every point in between. You can picture it a bit like the Everlasting Gobstoppers diagram, where theres a small candy “core” (your molecule), and then the sphere around the core. except that this “sphere” extends infinitely outwards from the molecule. Now take a step back.
Youre looking at many molecules now, picturing this “sphere of light” around each one. Lets say youre looking at six molecules, stacked two on two on two, and youre looking at the direct center, in-between the two in the middle row. So, since youre looking at this exact angle, picture only the light that will “get to” you from that angle and youll notice: Youre only seeing parts of the each of the molecules “light spheres.” From the top left molecule, youre only seeing the light