The Hegemony of the Planer Projection ...

[Sparrow]

Dear Stewart,

Of course, there's nobody on RFF that self-centred...

As for binocular vision being the preserve of the hunter, not the hunted, well, 3-4 is the age children start to take more command of their surroundings -- in preparation for hunting?

Cheers,

R.

I stuck with self rather than risk any of the Freudian definitions here

Yes, it could bring us back to the projectile trajectory thing, perhaps? they also learn to catch around that age.

 

[ferider]

It's from a military manual, an M2R, so the baseplate is right, Stewart ...

True about the lack of projection centre .... we engineers simplify things, to make things easier, stuff going cock, you know

I thought about that; fine for navigation, but then the distances and volumes go all to cock with anything off axis

Strictly speaking, axonometric projections are planar with projection centre at infinity.

 

[Rob-F]

50mm doesn't seem "natural" to me... Speaking for myself, 28mm or 35mm feels more natural.

+1. Those two focal lengths feel quite natural to me as well.

I am not sure where the 10mm figure, for focal length is coming from. It seems to me that we do not normally experience the foreground stretching, in daily life, that occurs with such a short focal length. I would say that, for me, 24mm or 25mm is about as wide as we can go before the picture starts to look unnatural. Sure, many of us have and use lenses wider than that; and sure, the pictures can be spectacular; but I think that in viewing such a picture, we realize that we ourselves don't really see that way. It's not that our peripheral vision doesn't cover a view that wide; it is more (I suppose) that anything very far out in the periphery is perhaps not included in our subjective perception of what we see.

I do think the phenomenology of vision as we perceive it, has got to be more useful in determining what is the "natural" focal length, than measurements of an eyeball, etc. Thus while an ophthalmologist may tell us (and they have) that the focal length of the eye is X number of mm, that doesn't really tell us what we experience. Only we can know that!

 

[FrankS]

+1. Those two focal lengths feel quite natural to me as well.

I am not sure where the 10mm figure, for focal length is coming from. It seems to me that we do not normally experience the foreground stretching, in daily life, that occurs with such a short focal length. I would say that, for me, 24mm or 25mm is about as wide as we can go before the picture starts to look unnatural. Sure, many of us have and use lenses wider than that; and sure, the pictures can be spectacular; but I think that in viewing such a picture, we realize that we ourselves don't really see that way. It's not that our peripheral vision doesn't cover a view that wide; it is more (I suppose) that anything very far out in the periphery is perhaps not included in our subjective perception of what we see.

I do think the phenomenology of vision as we perceive it, has got to be more useful in determining what is the "natural" focal length, than measurements of an eyeball, etc. Thus while an ophthalmologist may tell us (and they have) that the focal length of the eye is X number of mm, that doesn't really tell us what we experience. Only we can know that!

totally agree with this

 

[jmkelly]

Images shot at 28mm-35mm equiv. look "natural" to me as well, but there is an experiential intimacy to images shot at 50mm that is emotionally satisfying. Interesting that we only have cognitive dissonance when we look at wide-angle images. I don't need to do any perceptual re-processing when I look at images made with longer focal lengths. The only optical re-approximation there relates to binocular estimates of distance from subject.

I seem to recall that Francis Crick (the DNA guy) was studying visual awareness at the end of his career, and that at least one of his graduate students had pretty much refuted the idea that the spherical projection an image on the retina was somehow mirrored in the visual cortex. It's more like holography, where each finite element of the cortex is reacting to the entire visual field at once. It's the post-processing that renders our conscious awareness of what we're "seeing." It is a mistake to try to draw any functional parallels between lens rendering of 2d images, and our awareness of the same. Worse than chalk and cheese.

 

[Sparrow]

Images shot at 28mm-35mm equiv. look "natural" to me as well, but there is an experiential intimacy to images shot at 50mm that is emotionally satisfying. Interesting that we only have cognitive dissonance when we look at wide-angle images. I don't need to do any perceptual re-processing when I look at images made with longer focal lengths. The only optical re-approximation there relates to binocular estimates of distance from subject.

I seem to recall that Francis Crick (the DNA guy) was studying visual awareness at the end of his career, and that at least one of his graduate students had pretty much refuted the idea that the spherical projection an image on the retina was somehow mirrored in the visual cortex. It's more like holography, where each finite element of the cortex is reacting to the entire visual field at once. It's the post-processing that renders our conscious awareness of what we're "seeing." It is a mistake to try to draw any functional parallels between lens rendering of 2d images, and our awareness of the same. Worse than chalk and cheese.

IIRC it's called Visual Working Memory, and has some proof in experimental psychology. I was thinking more why, of all the ways we could represent that mental hologram, we, modern men, choose to represent it in the planar to the exclusion of all the others.

I don't think I'm confusing the projection of a lens with our perceived reality, it's the rendition of that perceived reality, that consciousness, that intrigues me.