The person who told me your name, or more specifically about your group, is lion42 and obviously a visually impaired person. I forgot the ratio she can see, but finding out about she got into photography and her subject matter. wasn’t fun.

So. I will ask you. How do you know, i guess where to point your camera, if you can’t well… see the target? For example… like the school for tap dancing. i can’t think of a good way to say this: If the dancers appear very unfocused and you can’t see very much at all of their performance, how do you know when and where to pont the camera to get the best shot?

I Hope you don’t get offended because, i don’t mean that because i can see, that i can do a much better job, i just wonder how you figure it out

This is how I answered the email:

Before I answer your question, let me suggest you visit our group, Blind Photographers, on Flickr and our web site. You will find good discussions plus a lot of photography by blind and visually impaired photogs.

Each blind photographer has a different visual impairment. Even if two of us share the same cause (disease or whatever), each level of residual vision will be different and the techniques that we have developed to adapt will be our own. So each of us shoots differently, depending on our visual acuity and chosen methods of adaptation. Even saying ‘visual acuity’ is misleading. Even saying that two of us have 20/300 vision does not mean that we see the say way. Some impairments cause blurriness (out of focus), some cause lower resolution (less ‘pixels’ per inch on our retina), some have better peripheral vision and others better central. Some have color issues, others have sensitivity to too much or too little light. All this is complicated by our having two eyes. It is a rare case where visual acuity is identical in both eyes. Sometimes the issues are not entirely (or even at all) ocular, but have to do with the way the brain processes our visual information. All of this is to say is that there is no representative blind photographer. I will share my story, but encourage you to learn more. A good place to start is our Project BlindSighted.

For me, I have much better vision than lion42. I see much closer to the 20/200 level, close enough that I get around without a cane, a dog or too many bumps and bruises. Yet I can not recognize my wife just a few feet away unless I know to expect her. I can’t read print without low vision aids. So how do I frame a photo? How do I know what is in my viewfinder? First, I zoom out when shooting and crop later on the computer. Second, I take a whole lot of photos, knowing most will be thrown out. Third, I pay attention and plan.

Everyone pays attention and plans, right? Probably not in the same way since the early days of photography with those large box cameras. I need to spend serious time getting to know the environs. From there, with some general observation, I can put together a good picture, so to speak, in my head.  For more details see my earlier post, Stitching Sight. Once I have an idea in mind of what and where everything is, all I need to do is anticipate and then  hit the shutter button a bunch of times. Hopefully, when I get the images uploaded to my computer, I will find that I captured what I though I captured.

This is my story. Each of us has a different one. Drew Bedo carefully constructs and controls his shooting environment to ensure he captures what he thinks he is capturing. Alex de Jong uses his ears, memories and feelings to frame his images. Read about Alex’s sonified viewfinder on his Project BlindSighted page.

This is a fairly frequent question. Hopefully, this answer will help those who stumble across it.

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Over the past week, I have put even more thought into this. I have realized that what is is much more than what my eyes see. Some part of my brain is constantly stitching together many different things to produce images. Memories, intuition and input from all my senses form the basis of wht I see. When I read, my eyes tend to catch the first few and last few letters of each word. For longer words, that leaves a jumble in the middle that my mind fills in by interpolation. Context and intuition have served me well here. This system works much more often then not. Every once in a while, this does not work, occasionally resulting in some amusing Mad Libs, and I need to take a closer look. I often mangle unusual words, especially names, often leaving myself unable to spell, never mind pronounce, these words properly.

I have come to realize that this interpolation is part of my whole visual process. This is broadly true of everyone, but, in my case, my brain relies much less on input from my optical nerves and much more on intuition and memory than those with unimpaired vision. When I visit new places, I often find myself making a circuit of the place, looking at everything closely and making a mental map. This is not just a regular map, but a detailed visual map. Like Google Maps with the terrain option and Street View enabled, my mental map automatically zooms in to fill in details my eyes miss. What my brain does not find stored in the memory banks, it fills in with its best educated guess. What sounds and  whose voices can I hear? Have I seen someone wearing that color today? Occasionally, I will ask a strange woman a question in public if she is wearing something similar to what my wife is wearing. That must come from my mind making assumptions, in this case incorrect,  based on whatever details it gets from my optic never.

I am not sure what, if anything, this speculation means. It does help me think about my photography a bit. The image I intend to make when I click the shutter is not the image in front of me, but rather the one I have constructed inside my head. If I can improve my process of constructing images in my head, either by using non-visual cues more efficiently or by finding ways to control my subjects and their environment, then I can improve both the images I make and the efficiency with which I make them, that is to say a higher percentage of better quality shots at the end of the day.

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