To See or Not to See

"To see" is a little 3 letter verb, that often slips into your daily conversations. "See you later!"...."Are you seeing anyone?"..."We'll see about that!" It can take on many meanings, yet many of us go about our daily business without really seeing. Even taken in a literal sense, our senses are bombarded with so much information every day, that we don't really see the things that surround us. Most of it is a casual taking in of familiar surroundings as we rush from place to place. Paradoxically, we never even truly notice or appreciate our surroundings until we move somewhere else entirely.

Photography allows for a whole new medium with which to see. Sure it has the same components as an eye - light hits a lens with a lid that blinks every now and then. But it allows for so much more. Super wide angle lenses allow for degrees of view much larger than the human eye, and a telephoto lens is like an eyeball on a giant rubber band with which you can suddenly transport your viewpoint a few hundred meters closer to your subject. A lens is like a third eye through which you can see an entirely new world - but the main difference is that you can share this world with the people around you. Through photography, you can express emotions for which there are no words, tell a story with a single image, and make the invisible visible. You can stay true to reality or impart your artistic interpretation. There are rules in photography like there are rules for everything in life, but often times it's when these rules are broken that great photographs result.