The BlindSighted Project allows members of Blind Photographers to explore challenges related to our eyesight, challenges that affect our image-making process. This project is an opportunity to explore how we approach photography.

And for anyone else who has had some thought of picking up a camera but hasn’t yet taken the plunge, I’d say, “just do it. Get any kind of camera, take any kind of shot, and try getting some results. You might be surprised how it takes off for you, and producing your own images can become an addiction!

I had a box camera when I was about 8 years old, but then I had more sight, even if it was only about 6/20 at best, and learned to take photos in the conventional way, looking through the viewfinder and adjusting the simple aperture and exposure controls.

Really photography since then has only been a very casual activity, such as taking a camera on holiday or recording other events in my own life. I got as far as using a 35mm camera which has too much stuff on it.

Then, 5 years or so ago I found out I was classifiable as blind, and since then my purpose in picking up a camera has changed completely. My first thought was that the camera can see things that I can’t, though I’ve since found out that that isn’t always the case – the camera can’t always capture what I see, but that’s quite interesting in itself. I have some usable sight, though it’s very distorted (macular degeneration and cateract) moves about a lot (nystagmus), and is subject to a lot of glare and colour confusion (poor genetics! Sorry mum and dad!).

I did buy a digital camera last year, thinking that would solve all ills. However, there was the little matter of learning the features on it, and both the manual and the menus were hard to get to grips with. I will return to suss it all out, but meanwhile, I just wanted to try my hand afresh with a camera, and the quickest way was to get a simple disposable camera and start to take shots of the world around me.

My subjects so far have on the whole been centred around nature breaking through into the city environment. Sometimes I’ll just find some object or other that doesn’t make much sense to me but makes an interesting image for some reason. Occasionally a building will grab my attention. I haven’t been taking pictures of people, on the whole, except for taking some of myself for the self-portrait project you may have read about elsewhere on this message board.

OK, so I set off walking from my house with my cheap film camera in my pocket. I’ll try to describe a recent session and how I set about it.

Actually i had two objectives at the same time. One was the self-portrait thing, where I’d find some interesting surroundings to take the self-portraits, and the other was a theme about life going on in the dea of winter.

No exotic locations here – I started off a couple of feet from my back door. As I have a colony of snowdrops taking over what I laughingly call a lawn, I thought a drift of snowdrops would be a good start.

I make less and less use of the viewfinder because I find that it doesn’t necessarily help me frame my pictures very well. What I tend to do is a sort of visual sweep of what I want to take, aim the camera at the middle of that sweep, get it roughly at the right angle top to bottom, and hope for the best. At times I’ve held the camera against my forehead, and that seems to work reasonably well.

I lay on the grass and aimed at the drift of snowdrops. No macro facilities here, so I knew I was taking a chance. One shot was almost blocked by a blade of grass, it turned out, but nonethe.less, I got a rather out of focus shot, which gave the snowdrops an interesting fleshy texture. In a sense it was a failure, in another I got a shot that I hadn’t bargained for.

Walking a couple of hundred yards from my house towards the river, I came to a ridiculous 200-foot-high rubber-clad building called the national Space Centre. It is so out of context where it has been plonked that I’d always wanted to take a shot of it through the railings of the local sewage treatment works, which would push it even further out of context! That’s a shot the tourists don’t see. that was nothing to do with my intedned themes, but what the heck? My visual sweep needed to go u and down this tme to make sure I could accommodate this grotesque tower in one shot.

Then I walked to the local park, which is always a rich source of material.

To be continued……

Responses

lodrorigdzin:

thanks for this! very informative. would you say your shooting has become more free when you stopped using the viewfinder?

electra-cute:

This is so interesting vip_uc Thank you for the inspiration!!!!!

Drew Bedo:

Hello VIP_UC,

Thanks for sharing your photographic vision and process. I couldn’t agree with you more that the single most important thing is to get out and shoot.

I like the falling snow idea. Try at night with a flash to freeze the action(Ok…so what if it IS a pun!).

The sweep-center-shoot approach: How about an overlapping (or spaced apart) series of shote that re-create the space before you? A somewhat longer than “normql” lens to narrow the field of view, and many exposures that when enlarged and displayed contact-sheet style, would show the whole scene.

Thanks again for sharing.

Thanks to all of you who have sent in comments. It’s most gratifying.

lodrorigdzin asked “would you say your shooting has become more free when you stopped using the viewfinder?”

Definitely. That might be the most important step forward I have made. Old habits die hard, you know, and I still find myself trying to look through the viewfinder, but very often it’s too misleading. I get much more of what I want when I look at the real world, listen, feel any rushes of air or sunlight, and so on. OK, if I had an enormous reflex viewfinder, such as you might find on a press camera, that would be different. I’ve even heard of someone monitoring their camera using a portable DVD player with a large monitor. But even then I wonder if I’d feel boxed in by it.

I like Drew Bedo’s idea of the falling snow, but we are not getting much snow in England these days. Still, the idea is a good one. Maybe when the apple blossom falls…… More complex ways of homing in on a subject will come in time, and thanks for that thought.

To continue this tiny but intricate journey……..

The entrance to the local park is a steep incline down from the road to the river. And there, uncluttered by the greenery we’ll have in the spring, was the perfect photo opportunity. The river, with its islands, and right in front of me, a noisy flock of seagulls. That with the rushing river sounds gave me about the clearest sound picture I could hope for, and I find this ordinary shot very satisfying.

When the next shot came through my scanner, I wondered what on earth i’d been doing. There was a mass of sky, and a bit of one of the river islands, very lob-sided. Just a failed shot, I thought. I must admit it took a sighted person to tell me that there was a lone gull in one corner of the photo. Then I knew….. I’d heard its cry and aimed the camera at it, not stopping to worry about framing or angles or anything else. It isn’t exactly exhibition material, but getting a result at all was pretty good going. I might be ready for some more advanced equipment, given that. I also now know that the concept of photographing with my other senses is proven and ready for development.

Some other shots did fail. It was a dull day, and dummy-face here didn’t use the flash, which was the only enhancement that camera had. Shame, I missed the Japanese garden and a sort of pagoda thing that serves as a shelter. Maybe I’d better go back when there’s some daylight. It was fine by the water – water puts out enough reflected light to make a big difference, as I’m sure any sailor will attest.

Along the way, I’d also been caught up in the seriously weird experience of taking photos of myself. This isn’t something I’d thought of doing until I was in contact with someone who’d come up with the idea as a college project.

You might like to take your courage in both hands and try self-portraiture, and I hope you’re feeling strong!

I tried not to be ‘posy’ about the whole thing, and the main reason for that is that I wouldn’t know how to pose anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever asked people to pose for a photograph, and I’m not going to start now – formal portraiture is a valid form of photography, but I would much rather make pictures of people in full flow.

The idea of the project was to get visually impaired people to take photos of themselves and to find out how the images may have differed from the self-image we have in our brains. This idea didn’t work for me at first until I started looking at the current set of photos.

Yes, I’ve aged 20 years since I last looked at a photo of me, and I very rarely look in the mirror either. So those pictures came as a bit of a shock.

As for the methods I used to take the shots, well, it was all a wild experiment. What isn’t?

I could dream of tripods, lighting, time delays and all the other niceties that real photographers might use, but at this point I didn’t have any of them. I simply turned the camera on myself as I did other things. Holding the camera at arm’s length and positioning it so that some combination of me and a background would contribute to a decent shot was all quite tricky, and as I know from some of the odd angles I got and the lack of background in many of them made this quite a learning experience.

So, those are some of my early experiments. It’s great to think that there will undoubtedly be much more to come.

lodrorigdzin:

am i correct in thinking that you are trying to photograph the space around you and the objects and occurrences in it? Myself, I have a difficult relationship with “space”, but I did find it helped me to go around touching the things that were around me, guided sometimes, but also as discovery on my own.

I forgot to include any credits for equipment and software and the likes.

Firstly the cameras I’ve been using lately are very simple disposable ones from Boots the Chemist in the UK. They have – usually – 27 exposures and a flash, and that’s it.

When I get the prints, I scan them with my Lexmark all-in-one (46xx series if I remember rightly).

Any fixing up I want to do is done with Paint Shop Pro, a very old version, 3.12, which has enough stuff in it for me, and I find it easy enough to use.

Windows Photo Gallery will make a slide show, and Windows Movie Maker will turn a series of photos into a video. I’ve used these in a casual sort of way.

Drew Bedo:

VIP: Your description of your river shoot took me back.

Many years ago, when I could see well, we took a trip to the Grand Canyon in Arixone. I made something like fifty exposures on Ektachrome with a Speed Grafic. Back at home I brought the film for processing to a professional lab in Houston. They spoiled about twenty of them. An accident; the details are not important. But as I looked through the pile of developed ‘chromes in sequence, I could remember the scene that would have been recorded on each blank 4×5 sheet. More; I could remember the smell of the cedar, the sound of the wind and, the heat of the sun….and so on. While I was disapointed, I realised that ,while capturing an image is central to the effort, there is much more to photography then that…as you have described, it is a much broader experience.

SlowerThanLoris:

VIP

You said about the difficulty you have using the manual for your new digital camera. I downloaded a PDF of my manual so that I can zoom in on it and read it onscreen.

Try Googling your camera make and model number + “pdf manual”.

Good Luck.

Oberazzi:

I downloaded a PDF of my manual so that I can zoom in on it and read it onscreen.

@SlowerThanLoris is completely about downloading manuals. I do that for most major things we but. I gave up on the paper manual a long while back.

Back in the original post, you wrote

However, what I’m doing is important to me, no matter how primitive it might seem.

It ain’t primitive. It is freedom. Going completely automatic can really free me from the stress of making a shot, letting me feel for use. Sort of like Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars learning the Force. At times, the equipment is necessary to make sure I get a reasonable shot if I need one. When I get frustrated with the equipment, though, it goes to automatic mode and I get back to photography.

the camera can’t always capture what I see, but that’s quite interesting in itself

I wonder how we can approximate what we see with the camera (or with software). Most attempts don’t work for me.

Read more on the original Flickr discussion thread: BlindSighted: vip_uc

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The BlindSighted Project allows members of Blind Photographers to explore challenges related to our eyesight, challenges that affect our image-making process. This project is an opportunity to explore how we approach photography.

- I’ve made a series about braille tiles and guiding lines, marking my cane at the minimum focus distance of my leica lens and feeling around for interesting features of the landscape.

-I’ve stuck a t/s lens on my 1Ds, and set it to maximum tilt towards the subject I want to photograph, which means that the half of the image “turning in” becomes sharp, while half of the image “outside” becomes unsharp, that’s how I do selective focus: vertically, not as depth of field.

- I’ve used Peter Meyer’s The vOICe as a sonified viewfinder. This uses a Nokia N82 that takes a still with the on board camera and then converts this to a sound pattern that indicates tonality and shape. This is what I use most, while shooting.

What I do. I hang around in a certain area for a long time, or I go there with company who point out interesting features to me. I then start to scan around with vOICe to determine the framing. If I use manual focus, I set the lens to minimum focus distance, but I’ve also recently bought a Lumix LX3, which I use with the autofocus on, in aperture priority. I set basic settings with sighted help (my son) and I hardly change them afterwards. The cool thing about vOICe is that I can use it to “look” at the LCD screen too, so I have some measure of feedback on framing and (more limited) on tonality. I make most of my work in BW, because that’s how vOICe sees it, although it has talking selective filtering, so I can know what kind of colours are in my photos.

Processing is done in Lightroom, I have an assistant (funded by the government) who does this for me. Uploading I can do myself.

I love rich sound. So I go to markets a lot, really anywhere on the street where there’s lots going on. I do shoot in company too, often my son, or my wife, or friends, and they often point things out to me that might be worth shooting.

Before I used to be really on the hunt: lots of walking around. Now, I stay in one spot and let the images come to me. Often I will shoot in a certain way, using sound as a clue, people approaching, or cars passing. Lately I’ve begun panning bicycles. I do that by sound too. But just as often, I’ll hit on something with my cane, seems interesting, and I feel around for it with my cane, and I want to catch it. Markets are great because there are lots of scents too, and I can touch anything sold. I do imagine space and the things in it. It’s why I like rain for instance, because everything becomes so much more audible, I can really hear space. I use vOICe in this way to increase my scanning range, but I do that by clicking too, I must say.

I think my shooting style evolved from pure disgust with the way I was trained. I studied photography at what was then called “Middle Technical School of Photography. See the technical in there? No misnomer that. So I was brought up on Large Format view cameras and the assumption was that everyone there would go into studio photography doing packshots. So what you were trained to do was to deliver consistent quality for clients, which is the bread and butter of commercial photography. Back then the focus (forgive the pun) was very much on “tack sharp”. `And I always wanted to go for the unfocused, sometimes entirely unfocused. This was seen as “wrong” by my teachers and I had to constantly defend my images against what they saw as “good form”.

I think I am very much interested in people and their surroundings, the objects they use and touch, the way they function in their personal space. I love selective focus, so finding only one, sometimes almost unnoticeable area of focus in my photographs and I love the way certain lenses “write” out of focus, and I use them for that capacity only. There’s a zen saying about serving food: nothing needs to be warm except rice and soup, and I apply that to photography as well. As long as there is one little bit in focus it doesn’t matter whether other areas are out of focus.

The other thing I have learned is to shoot for the edges of the frame (which is why I love rangefinder photography, because it enables you to shoot the edges instead of the central subject)
I often place my subjects excentrically, as if they are not the real focus of the photograph. I’ve shot portraits like that in bars, where you really have to look hard to see who is being portrayed. I love that sense of confusing, the fact that you don’t know quite what’s going on in a photograph.

And I love, love, love blur, motion blur, bokeh blur, it doesn’t matter what kind of blur. I think blur is very telling, because the eye will want to make sense of it. And so you engage immediately, because you have to look for meaning in the photograph.

And sometimes I do self portraits, but these, granted are from when I still could see. But, as people tell me: the central themes haven’t changed and are consistent in the before and in the after work.

I think I take photos because I like to see things. I like to look at things and I love how things show themselves. That’s a little bit difficult. It seems that my camera does all this seeing very well. First I resisted this. Because I thought that if I didn’t make choices in the shooting, I would not be photographing. But it is like touch: I hold the camera and I know the lens is going to touch somewhere or something or someone. And it always does. I found it takes courage to point the camera out into space. Like when you’re in a room and someone has left you standing, you are afraid to announce yourself, because it makes you look stupid and unaware. That is why I was afraid of shooting this way, because I didn’t want to look stupid. Longing for sight it is. Or re-building it from the photographs. I always liked being on trains and trams and buses because I liked looking at the landscape going by. Now my camera does that for me. So I’ve still witnessed it if I’ve shot it. Touching is seeing, in a way. Holding the camera in my hands is seeing, in a way. I know that sometimes the same people are in more than one photograph because I follow them. I’d like a film of the flow and someone just noting the things that appear in it. (…) I thought: it’s like making a film in frames/hour instead of frames/second and sometimes it speeds up, it gets more concentrated: those are the videos.

vOICe does sound like just a mass of noise when you first encounter it, but I must say, with the material on the website, and just going ahead and using it, and learning it, that did change.

I don’t use it for wayfinding much, but once, on a business trip to Helsinki, I did use it for instance to walk between the tables and chairs in the restaurant, and to find out, on my own, whether a particular chair was free. All independently. So for me it is very useful, but I think its usefulness increases as your vision is less, because you have to totally let go of “translating” sight into sound. It is its own world of sonified perception, and you have to make the leap to trust your instincts in what you are perceiving. At least, these are my experiences.

I think I focus on particular details in the sound that I find interesting. This has always been how I worked cameras, shooting my lenses wide open, picking out one tiny area of focus. That hasn’t changed, although I arrive at the result differently now. I do use vOIce to take a photo of the LCD to roughly check whether my impressions have carried over to the photograph. It’s an approximation but it isn’t correct.

lately I’ve started investigating whether it would be possible for me to re-creat photographs by other people. Sometimes I use vOICe to look at others’ images, and sometimes from the sound, these are terribly appealing. Like, a flickr contact and good friend posted a photograph that contained a carton of bottles, all little bubbles, circles, a kind of very appealing rippling effect when I saw it with vOICe, and I set off to re-make an image that would evoke the same impression for me, by means of vOIce, but just translating the compositional elements. I did one test, wasn’t satisfied, but I’m still thinking about it.

Never tried tactile techniques, because I want my photographs to be photographs. For me it’s the print that’s most important. I make prints/photographs for other, mostly seeing, people, not for myself. Because to me, photographs are not about representations of subject matter, but about tonality, tonal forms you might say. My photos always were and still are very blurry.

I have a NASA book in tactile format, and to be honest, I get a clearer visual impression from vOICe.

Perhaps your colleague is referring to embossing or swell paper? I think there’s a japanese photography exhibition and book that puts out photographs in tactile format.

Last year I saw Nan Goldin’s slide show at the MoMa with a photographer friend of mine, and she talked me through the slideshow, sort of getting into the rhythm of it, the flow. That to me is an accessible format: someone speaking the photograph to me. I wish there were more opportunities to see visual art that way, because I need that kind of input, always have needed it.

Read more on the original Flickr discussion thread: [BlindSighted] lodrorigdzin’s process – Street Photography and Sonified View Finder

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The BlindSighted Project allows members of Blind Photographers to explore challenges related to our eyesight, challenges that affect our image-making process. This project is an opportunity to explore how we approach photography.

I send my negatives to a lab for processing. The negs are scanned at home on a Epson v750. I use photoshop to crop the images and adjust brightness and contrast a little. I can’t adjust color too well. Prints are made with an Epson R2400.

Sometimes I think that the hardest thing is to thread the tripod into the camera base-plate! Some day maybe I’ll get a quick release mount.

Responses

Oberazzi:

What is the GG? Can you see enough to tell if the focus lines snap in? What’s the taret?

Do you ever make images in other styles, such as portraits?

More later.

GG=Ground Glass: The focusing screen of a large format camera. For a 4×5 caamera its 20 square inches, for 8×10 its 80 square inches. I can center the mass of a composition as a grafic design, then with strong magnification, I can work with an area of about 2 “sq at a time.

The targets I use are usually the bar-code from a Jello box. I can make out the change but often cannot actually get the lines sharp…have to rock back and forth to narrow it down. I try to use the LF movements to help maximize DOF.

I do attempt landscapes from time to time…usually not too impressive. Dont do portrates.

lodrorigdzin :

Do you measure focal distances? I’ve done that for a while with my cameras. I do portraits that way, but that may be impractical with a view camera. In photography school we had to work with the view camera for three years (hated it) and we were taught to measure and calculate everything. It’s still how I work with my cameras.

Oberazzi:

I am chock full of dumb questions today. Fortunately, I don’t care as long as I learn something. What is an LF? Large format?To what extent do you plan your shot and visualize it ahead of time? Do you have a particular DOF you like to get?

I have never used a large format camera. How are they different from the DSLR I use now? Your mention of the GG implies that the viewfinder is as large as the image rather than the annoyingly tiny little thing on my camera.

How do choose what to put in your still lifes? Do you follow themes? Genres, colors, etc.?

@lodrorigdzin : I have measured the lens-to-subject gidtance to calculate depth-of-field at times, but mostly not. However, I do measure the film-to-lens distance to figure the exposure compensation for bellows extension pretty often.

@oberazzi : Sure..LF = Large Format…you’re not so dumb.

I plan a session by looking for plasing light. I like window light, but love the slanting light of late afternoon when outdoors. I plan what objects to shoot and think about what is in the backround…maybe I unpack a tablecloth or beadspread. Then I start fussing with the subject articles till a composition clicks At this point. I try to get a sense of what it looks like on the ground glass glass. That is how I “plan” an image.

You are again right about the film and ground glass being the same size. A view camera is very different from a D-SLR in that nothing is automatic. The equipment is cumbersome and the process is slow and deliberative by comparison.

For subject matter I look for interesting objects, shells and flowers, gourds and household things. I have several ideas about future sessions and there are places I want to return to and re-shoot.

If you are interested in learning about large format photography, I would suggest “The Camera” by Ansel Adems, or Steve Simon’s book (dont remenber the title). Another, quicker resource is

www.lfphoto.info

There are articles on View Camera Photography that can help you get a handle on it.
Originally posted 3 months ago.
Drew Bedo edited this topic 3 months ago.

Oberazzi:

The equipment is cumbersome and the process is slow and deliberative by comparison.I think that our processes all have a bit of this is common. Without immediate visual cues, we substitute with our brains and non-visual cues. But this substitution takes time. So we find ways to slow the process down. Using your LF equipment is one example of this. Planning and preparation are another.

Read more on the original Flickr discussion thread: BlindSighted: Drew Bedo’s Process

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The BlindSighted Project allows members of Blind Photographers to explore challenges related to our eyesight, challenges that affect our image-making process. This project is an opportunity to explore how we approach photography.

I work best when I have a plan. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to shoot on a given day, but I usually work within a few forms, and those forms govern how I equip myself and how I size up my surroundings visually.

One form I use I call the “corner tableau.” All the photos composed within this form have an array of people standing at a street corner as their main subject. Corners are a good place to do street photography in general because they are a natural congregation point. People of all types are forced to gather and interact with each other, even if it’s only to exchange uneasy glances. Because I want to get clear pictures of the subjects’ faces and can’t safely stand in the street, I shoot from across the street with a medium telephoto lens, typically a zoom so I can frame tightly. I usually frame the subjects head to toe because body language is an important part of humor in these situations.

The corner itself has to be chosen with some care. if the area isn’t busy enough you don’t get a good mixing bowl effect and get few interesting interactions. If traffic is too heavy the vehicles will block your sightlines for too long and you can’t keep track of what’s going on. If traffic is too light, people will be tempted to jaywalk and you won’t get the congregation at the corner. If you choose a west facing corner late on a clear day, faces will be contorted because of the bright sun in the subjects’ eyes, masking the real emotions. If you choose a drug corner… well, you get the idea.

The images themselves are produced mostly by instinct. I trip the shutter based on gestures or changes in body language, trying to anticipate an interesting moment rather than react to one. I can’t see enough detail in a camera to reliably judge facial expressions in these shots, so I have no choice but to read body language.

Here’s an example of a rare tableau featuring only two subjects:

I created these two photos by tripping the shutter when I noticed the subjects’ heads turning.

Another form I use is the simple headshot or portrait, reinterpreted for the street. Working this form, I go out looking for interesting faces, novel faces, or faces doing interesting things. The same lighting rules that work for traditional portraiture apply to street work, but you have to find natural situations that provide that flattering yet dramatic light. To fill the frame as I like without getting right in peoples’ faces, a telephoto lens is essential for this work.

Also essential for this form is a camera with a fast and flexible auto focus system. The head shots are almost always taken of moving subjects, so I have to pan to track the subject, placing the face where I want it in the frame. I have to be confident that the camera will adjust focus as the subject and I move because there’s no hope at all of manually focusing in such a situation.

A more traditional form is the straightahead reflex shot, where you shoot with a normal or wide angle lens, react to a situation, framing it and shooting it as fast as you can. I enjoy this form as much as the others, but it is difficult for me due to my limited distance and peripheral vision. A developing scene is often upon me before I can fully apprehend it, while the other forms allow me to see a scene developing and be ready for the moment. I’ve had some successes, though; here’s one example shot in New York City:

The camera setup is simple for this form. I use a wide angle lens, 24mm typically on a full 35mm frame camera like the Canon 5D. I manually focus it to a likely shooting distance and let depth of field do the rest. I like to vary my shooting angles to avoid all my shots having the same tall man’s point of view— half the frame empty, the other half full of the tops of people’s heads and shoulders. Sometimes I’ll tip the camera down, sometimes I’ll stoop, sometimes I’ll shoot with the camera away from my eye (something you can do competently with practice). The point of all the various techniques is to get the point of view and framing that the shot requires without disturbing the developing scene.

And then there’s the oddball stuff that so far defies easy classification. Like my other street photography, the photos involve people, but they typically also involve unusual framing and light. I can never plan these shots, rather I just have to keep my mind open for the visually interesting wherever it might present itself.

I think I’m only partially aware of how my visual impairments affect how I do photography. The best approximation of my vision for those with normal vision seems to be “low resolution.” I can see most things out to infinity but can’t resolve much beyond a certain apparent diameter at any distance. I’ve never had vision better than this so the way I apprehend the world is the way I’ve always apprehended the world and I’ve pasted photography on top of that. Most of my photos aren’t detail driven. I’m not going to see minute details in the viewfinder so my shutter releases will be based on larger visual cues like body language and knowledge of human behavior that allows me to anticipate events. As a result I’m often surprised when I get home and look at my photos, seeing for the first time what I missed out of the street.

My camera setup is probably like that of a normally sighted person. Nothing I can do to the camera setup is going to replace the detail vision I lack, so the primary feature I need in a camera is a fast auto-focus system, with enough tracking smarts and focus points that I can put subjects where I want them in the frame. How I operate the camera is likely quite different than a sighted person, as I think I’m more likely to memorize control positions and menus to avoid having to look closely at them while I’m working.

Responses

Oberazzi:

@kylejones: Thanks for posting in this project.I think my eyesight is similar to yours, so I have adapted much the same way. “I’m often surprised when I get home and look at my photos, seeing for the first time what I missed out of the street.” Me, too.

more later.

Drew Bedo:

Hello Kyle,Thanks for talking about how you work to make an imag. Sounds like you stand somewhat back from the subject area and shoot with longer lenses…right?

For the headshots and the corner stuff, yes, because it makes sense for that. It doesn’t make sense for man-in-the-crowd shots like this, however, so you have to choose the lens and shooting distance for the task.

Oberazzi:

How do you process the images on the computer? I am currently using (really learning) Lightroom. I would like to leave the image as close to the one captured, but almost always the color balance and exposure are off significantly. It makes me wonder if I am adjusting the image to how I see the world not how the rest of the world sees it.

I use Aperture for general cataloging and storage, RAW conversion and white balance. Then I export to Photoshop for noise reduction, exposure correction, B&W conversion, dodging, burning and sharpening. Then back to Aperture for tinting, straightening and cropping, if any.

If I don’t have an idea how I want the final processed image to look then I’ll sit on it until I get an idea. Sometimes it will take months for me to see the right approach, so I purge images slowly to give my unconscious mind some time to work.

Read more on the original Flickr discussion thread:[BlindSighted] kylejones

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I am interested in knowing about HOW we all work. How do we set up the equipment, choose (or create) a composition, make an exposure and produce a print?

For instance: I know of a photographer,not a member of this group yet, who shoots interiors of large. He frames a bright window or entryway on a large format camera. He uses hyperfocal principles to get sharp focuus and uses premeasured sticks to set the diastance between the front and rear standards. His shutters have click stops for speed and aperature. He contact prints in alternative processes (cyanotype, platinum etc).

So then; What do YOU do?

At Drew’s suggestion, I would like to begin a project where we, as a community, investigate how each of us makes photographs. We are all unique in the way we use our camera. We vary in our experience, equipment, interest and goals. Some of us are professionals and others hobbyists, some are more artistic and some less so, some shoot daily and some sporadically, some shoot for an audience and some for themselves. These define, in part, how we approach the camera. Yet we all share something in common. We each face challenges related to our eyesight, challenges that affect our image-making process. Let’s take this opportunity to explore how we approach photography. Possibly, we will adapt our own processes as we learn the details of how others make images. If not, we can still satisfy our curiosity about how our vision affects our images.

This project neatly solves an issue that I have wanted to deal with since I founded the flickr group. I have always asked new members to share their stories. This builds a foundation for our community. But these threads have been to awkward to address the issue, central to our group, about the interaction between visual impairments and our photography. This is chance for each of us to be and stay in the spotlight.

On a practical note, we regularly receive questions about how our eyesight and our photography interact. I have received two surveys in the past few weeks from students in two separate continents. This project should, at least, give these students a place to start. If there is interest, perhaps we could work to publish this project.

The Process

The project will work as follows. Anyone interested should start a topic in the discussion forums. Title it appropriately, such as “Blindsighted: Oberazzi”, so we know that the topic is part of the project and whose process we are focusing on ih this thread. Then lay out how you actually produce images, how your vision affects you and how you adapted your process to deal with your vision. How do you set up the equipment, choose (or create) a composition, make an exposure and produce a print?

The reason we each will have our own thread is so that the rest of us can follow up with questions. Trying to contain this in one discussion topic would become cumbersome and confusing. Interesting questions would be lost in the jumble of thoughts. Consider your thread like a blog where you can develop your own story over time. If and when you are satisfied with the results we can carry it over to this blog.

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We are a group of blind photographers. All of us have to contend with various degrees of visual impairment. If you look around on the internet, it seems there are other blind photographers and so a number of them was bound to use flickr to share photographs. The “blind photographers” flickr group was created to offer a venue for discussion, to share our individual and joint vision, to admire each other’s photographs, bug members with technical question, and generally, to hang out and enjoy each other’s company. This worked so well, that we now have a membership of 130 photographers and have branched out to other spaces on the internet: facebook, twitter, the old “best of blind photographers” blog, which has now incarnated in this dedicated wordpress blog. As we value discussion and photography both, we decided to maintain two blogs: a curated photoblog as a showcase for work by blind photographers, and this blog, as a venue for blind photographers to discuss, to share and to rant (occasionally).
So, please feel free to be part of our community, join us on flickr, find us on facebook, show your work and share its story with us. We plan on porting the discussions we are having on flickr regarding technique and philosophy to this blog too, in a series of “blindsighted” articles, while we hope that blind photographers everywhere will include their profiles on this blog and their work on our photoblog.

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