context and photography

While walking over the overbridge over the train tracks, I saw the rail tracks glistening with the light of yellow signal. The yellow long lines dividing the dark into equal twos, textured and raw, with the smell of metal and sweat of urban nation. The east side dark ended with jagged edges of station roof - the undulating continuity of shades of gray and grime. the west side dark went on only until the pillar standing in between me and it.

Then a bird came and sat over the signal. Almost in dark. The light from signal of no consequence to it (apart from possible heat of the metal on its feet). Still its black eyes managed to shine a dark shine against its black body.

I so wanted to capture the moment into a photograph framed thus - the focus on the bird pirched on signal. though the tracks visible just as well, and so is the dark. essentially, to capture the whole experience of being there, but I couldn't do it. U have to have a central focus in a pic to give meaning to it. Thats the predominant thought. People ooh n aah (and so do I :D) to pics depicting sharply focused pics with interesting subjects. However, I see a possibility of photographs absorbing the whole of scenario and then 'somehow' allowing for photographer to identify the object of the photograph, maybe many objectives in one. and while doing so, I don't want any loss of information of surrounding, so comparative tinting, burring etc are out of question.
Read my entry about innovations in visual data presentation in my digital nativity blog here. and now, there seems to be a possibility of this objective of mine being fulfilled. Hopefully, we will have instruments akin to cameras that could do that, instead of me having to take several pictures.

Of vision and photography.

This post started as a response to a comment made by a friend to the earlier post. But my thought took me a little further than they should have, so am posting the ramblings here as a post.

well, the earlier post alludes to something grander and something that runs through many of my earlier posts and has consonance with what you said.

reality is something that one constructs about oneself. reality isn't an absolute. Mahatma Gandhi's quote 'to your own truth, to your wisdom, thats where u must go', has stuck with me like anything, and lends itself to the notion of reality and here it ties up with the question of vision.

Our 'truth', our 'wisdom' is constrained in the frame of our vision.
I celebrate that increment in conscience with increased field of vision in the earlier post.

Secondly, the thought was inspired from an observation when looking. The vision of man. if I am to talk in terms of photography, Ayn Rand's 'man' would be picturised with the man dominating the frame, and gaze being from lower vantage than the subject.
As against, a Lovecraftian character would be framed in a corner of the frame, being looked down upon.
Both instances provide a revelation of sorts, mind u, but they steal away details from the person and renders him a 'hero' in the sense that he is removed from his reality by the act of framing. Much of our literature and popular culture is based on this act of removing a person from his context and reintroducing him with the assumed qualities.

The revelation that I spoke of in earlier post is neither of these two, but a person in context to his world. Suddenly shapes and sizes in vision have a politics of their own. The person can relate to the grandeur of the car he is driving -An organism of his progeny, and the man in control of it. An organism bigger, stronger than him and still he may 'get inside of it' and 'get out of it' along his will; The man comprehending the fullness of a skyscraper, the emotion of awe mixed with triumph.
I am shy of photographing any other way. Its a handicap sometimes. I have a inertia towards capturing portraits. I absolutely turn pukish to take photographs with the subject posing for it. And I hardly ever use flash. I don't like the act of photography interfering with the subject's context.

I found something pertinent and am posting it here verbatim -

A search of the Nexis database of English-language publications worldwide finds zero uses of the phrase before 2005 but 600 since then. It appeared in The New York Times apparently for the first time in a quote on May 24:

“Unlike people 65 and older who immigrated online after spending their youths thumbing through reference books, today’s children are digital natives who are fluent in the language of online searches,” said Marc Prensky, an educational consultant and the author of ‘’Don’t Bother Me Mom — I’m Learning!'’