A simple pic I wanted to share, together with an interesting lesson learned...

This is just a view on some roofs in my home town (view from my office building), I liked the geometry and the chimneys.

The interesting part of the story is that what I was seeing in real life is impossible to get on a picture ! What you see is NOT what you get. A camera only has ONE eye... so between the two large chimneys, in real life, with 2D vision (like most people), you'll see 4 smaller ones with some space on the left and on the right), and on any picture taken with a camera, you'll see three of them, unless you significantly move forward, completely changing the perspective and making other elements visible and invisible. In other words, I could not get what I saw on any picture taken by a "normal" camera... just wanted to share the strange feeling.

Here's the pic (D40x + 18-200VR for what it's worth)

For what it's worth, I really like your composition a lot. Though I don't usually like monochome, you've done a good job here.

I also agree with you that it's awfully hard to get the same perspective as you get with your eyes. I thing your eye is somewhere around a 50mm fisheye. They just don't make that.

Plus you have two of them that puts all the information into one frame.

Guy, totally agreed. The upside is, you can put this to work in your favor as well. You can use all the tools out there to create the image you envision - not necessarily how it is.

Guidenet wrote:
For what it's worth, I really like your composition a lot. Though I don't usually like monochome, you've done a good job here.

I also agree with you that it's awfully hard to get the same perspective as you get with your eyes. I thing your eye is somewhere around a 50mm fisheye. They just don't make that.


I remember the day when this hit me that my eyes were a certain "focal length" and I was angry that I wasn't given zoom lenses like some super heroes

maybe thats why I primarily shoot primes

Here's an explanation of how it happens.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2905/does-the-camera-really-add-ten-pounds-plus