Mark Nicol (Photoelektric)

Welcome to Blind Photographers

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Chesterman Beach - Canon A310 point and shoot - Click images to view larger. Use your browser's back button to return to this page.

Having been legally blind since birth, photography didn’t register as a possible means of expression for me. My dad had been an enthusiast in the film days and after looking through his old Canon AE-1 a couple of times, it became clear that my view through a camera was anything but. Fast forward to the digital age. At 34 I bought my first camera. I thought my little Canon 3.2mp point and shoot would be perfect for taking silly pictures of my friends and I could even sort of see through the little LCD to shoot. Straight out of the box, I tried to create and compose with the camera instead of snapping happily at my crew. I soon began to try to coax more out my automatic camera by tricking it into giving me the exposures I wanted instead of the ones it preferred.

Upon realizing its limitations, my attempts to wring more out of my first camera triggered an acute case of gear lust but more importantly, a heady desire to experiment with the equipment and my new method of ‘seeing’.

Grassius - Sony DSC-R1

My eye condition is called congenital stationary nightblindness. I do see very poorly at night but because my retinal resolution is reduced to 20/200, my daytime vision is also affected and is a 10th that of someone who has perfect vision. I am also fairly nearsighted and the glasses I wear correct my vision to the 20/200 level. I call myself a cusper because I am just barely considered legally blind with my glasses on. I made it, I’m legal!

Mount Baker 75-300mm

My camera and lenses augment my vision in several ways. The most obvious of these is by acting as a set of binoculars. I had never really seen Mount Baker until I took this shot. Oh sure, the many miles distant mountain is visible to me on a clear day but not in any detail.

Fishing - Canon 40D, 70-200 f4IS

I have always found it interesting to note the details in distant objects available to those with normal vision. I find that after I take a shot with my 70-200 lens, I am able to take in that detail too on the camera’s LCD display or later, on the computer screen. With this shot, I found myself thinking, “wow, he was right, those eyes really are a brilliant yellow.”

Sunflower, 90mm macro

These powers of magnification extend not only to distant things but to the land of the small as well. Using a macro lens, I am able to see fine detail and even make personal discoveries about the things I photograph. The texture and rich colours of these sunflower leaves were revealed using a 90mm macro lens.

Dominance - Sony DSC-R1

Isolating subjects is yet another way that I augment my vision with photography. In Dominance, I isolated the leaves from their background both with selective focus and by exposing for the main subject, rendering the background overexposed. These techniques are visually effective for me together or seperately.

Vinales Commuters

In Vinales Commuters I again isolated my subject with selective focus and combined this with another photographic ‘seeing’ technique – that of freezing a fast moving object. Missing the action is a very common visual frustration for me and being able to capture a moment like this is a great pleasure. A photograph such as this does highlight a technical challenge of mine. Upon buying my latest camera, a Canon 40D, I put a -3 diopter lens on the viewfinder. Combined with the -3 that can be dialed in on the camera’s diopter adjustment, I can match my eyeglasses perscription in the viewfinder, which allows me to shoot without my specs. This corrects my nearsightedness in camera but does nothing to increase the resolving ability of my retina. I still see only a 10th the detail of someone with perfect vision and this makes the red auto-focus confirmation squares and the green shutter speed and aperture numbers, etc. impossible to see in all but the best light. The Nikon photography school used to state that the best photographers have the deepest trash bins. With all the shots I miss due to misfocus and other missed viewfinder information, I can say with great confidence that those Nikonians’ garbage cans have nothing on mine.

Photography, especially in the digital age, allows one to be selective with the dynamic range in an image or to increase it over what the human eye is capable of seeing, using post-production techniques such as HDR imaging.

Night Legislature - Sony DSC-R1

With the use of long shutter speeds, one can make a photograph in practically no light at all. The BC Legislature is fairly well lit at night but a tripod and a slow shutter speed revealed more detail in the building than my eyes were capable of perceiving.

HDR (high dynamic range) imaging is a product of the digital age of photography and is a way of pulling together several different exposures of the same scene to produce an image where the dynamic range is greater than that of any of the individual shots. The human eye has more dynamic range than even the best of today’s digital SLRs so photographers must often choose whether they want to expose for the highlights and let detail in the darker areas of a photo fade into the shadows or expose for the detail in the darker regions and let the highlights blow out. The human eye is usually able to do all of this at once but cameras, at least today, cannot.

Butchart HDR - Canon 40D - 5 varied exposures tone mapped in Photomatix.

This technique can be used to replicate what the eye can see but with exposures spaced further apart in a very contrasty scene, surreal looking images beyond what the eye sees, can be created. Far more dynamic range than the human eye is capable of resolving was achieved in Butchart HDR. While the technique can appear garish it does augment what the human eye is capable of.

While I find the traditional aspects of photography such as line, texture, pattern, colour and perspective, etc. very fullfilling to study, I do wonder if I was perhaps first drawn to the camera due to its bionic nature. When I’m out taking pictures, as often as anything, I find myself thinking, “I wonder what that looks like”. So I make a photograph.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/38572690@N00/