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Benefit From How You See The World


My latest article introduces a link I recently made between the psychology of the Recticular Activating System (RAS) and the artistic ‘eye’.

English_Photographer_Waterfall_Golden_Dawn_Light_Photo
Dawn Light on Waterfalls in the Pyrénées

It turns out that most of what our eyes see never makes it to our conscious awareness; it is filtered out by the RAS.

This happens in three ways;

Generalising: Because the world is complicated, we simplify it. We see a forest instead of individual trees. This is why when you show someone a beautiful photograph of somewhere that they recognise, they’ll normally just respond, ‘oh, I’ve been there’.

Highlighting: In the same way that you’ll hear your name mentioned even with several conversations going on at once, the eyes will pay more attention to what’s useful to us. It used to be tigers; now it’s usually advertising that uses the same principle of contrast = attraction.

Deleting: And sometimes we’ll just ignore things altogether. Global poverty aside, these mental blinkers are incredibly useful. There is simply too much clutter for our brain to process otherwise. Photographically, it means we don’t see potential distractions.

So our view of the world is incredibly subjective, and unique to every person. This is how we can learn to See with Holistic Photography. It’s possible to train the RAS to develop the elusive artistic ‘Eye’ through a special process.

Thanks to Darren Rowse from ProBlogger for whom I wrote this article on the Digital Photography School site – which will get about five million views this month. Check out how the way that you see the world can improve your photography here.

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