Capturing What You Don’t See H
ow many times have you heard someone say when you look at their pictures, “You should have been there. I just couldn’t capture what I saw.” I’ve heard it many times, even from photographers who really know what they’re doing. The truth is, cameras and lenses don’t capture what we see. They come close . . . sort of . . . and we accept that our photographs represent reality. But do they? Is reality what we see or what we photograph? They aren’t the same in many, many instances. Consider the following photographic scenarios.
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1. With our eyes, we never, ever see out of focus backgrounds. I took the picture below of a lilac breasted roller in South Africa with a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto wide open, and the background landscape became completely out of focus. I didn’t see that as I was shooting. The reality was that everything in the composition was sharp, from the immediate foreground to the distant background. No matter how attractive an out of focus foreground or background might be, it does not represent what you saw at the time of shooting. Shallow depth of field is a manmade construct
