Why Some Photos Fail to Capture Emotions?

Introduction

Essentially, the functional differences between an eye and a camera are not many, but there are huge differences between observing and photographing. Let's dig into this topic together!

What Will We Learn?

The purpose of this article is to provide advice on how to train your photographer's eye and to understand why certain photos fail to capture the emotions of the moment the picture was taken. The path we want to follow is to deeply explore how observation differs from photography.

What we will discuss on this page is the result of years of study and observation. It's a subject that other sources often treat superficially, which we hope will help you achieve increasingly beautiful and impactful travel photographs.

Why Some Photos Fail to Capture Emotions?

Let's start with the end, so as to answer right away the main question of this article: why do some photos fail to capture emotions? The more tenacious readers, in the second part, can delve into the differences between observation and photographing, which are two completely different activities.

Observing is an active operation, involving the observer with emotions and feelings related to living the moment. Photographing, by contrast, is an operation that we do for other people, where we have to portray something that will be observed by someone who is not present with us.

As if that weren't enough, the brain does not store images as photographs but as stories, linking them to the emotions perceived through the other senses. The task of associating an emotion with a memory belongs to the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for transferring information from short-term memory to long-term memory.

Photography, on the other hand, is more detached, since it's not linked, for example, to scents, the warmth on the skin, or the euphoria of the moment. In the composition of a photo, you have to remember that the observer is not involved, so it should be our priority to frame all the components necessary to convey the emotions that the photograph needs to evoke. This is the main problem of less appealing photos.

Of course, this is only necessary for photographs that have to be seen by others. When you take a photo during your travel or vacatio,n you've also lived the moment, and the fact that you can remember it will compensate for any lack in terms of artistic composition. By contrast, we can argue that a well-framed photo will always be a better memory than a poor one, even if it's just a travel picture for your eyes only.

When a professional takes a photograph, he makes sure that everything that is needed for the observer is framed, and all that isn't needed, or is unaesthetic, is skillfully cropped. This technique must be learned very well if you want to create truly effective photographs.

Remember to include elements in the shot that can stimulate the viewer's emotions. If you are photographing an oriental market, try to frame the spices, the colors, and the people, putting all this atmosphere into your photo. If you are photographing the amazing town of Cortina, try to give the impression of the majesty of the Dolomites, the peacefulness of the forest, and the vitality of "Corso Italia," the ppedestrian area in the town's center.

Try to train your eye to see how a certain scene will result in a photograph. Take a wide look, looking at the whole scene, especially the peripheral part, to notice if there's some disturbing element, since most of the photos are now taken with the ultra-wide lenses of phones.

If you plan to use a telephoto lens, you may try closing one eye and framing with your hand, like the caricatured directors you see in movies.

Regardless, try to get used to looking a lot more through the camera's viewfinder or the display; it will allow you to absorb how a shot will turn out through your usual lens.

You have to learn to walk, move, and search for the best point of view using the eyes of the camera, not yours. Get closer, get farther, go down, try to stand on a bench. Try to put something in the foreground to enhance the tridimensionality, shoot through flowers, experiment, and play. The goal is the same as before: absorb how a shot will turn out in different conditions. Learn to use post-processing and use it wisely. Most of the time the default settings are more than enough, but there are exceptions.

In case the moment of the shot has a particular atmosphere, try to capture it. Use color balance, or black and white, and learn how to set the correct exposure when the dynamic range is really high. This means, for instance, that if the sky is particularly dramatic, you should sacrifice the foreground; choose an exposure that valorizes the clouds, even if the terrain will result in being very dark.

All of these settings can be done in post-processing, but modern phones allow us to do it easily in real time. Use these tools, but don't exaggerate; try to represent what you see and feel, not what the camera sees with default settings, as sometimes it could be dull.

In all of this, we must not forget the greatest positive side of photography over reality: it allows us to frame only what we like, fooling the observer into believing that a breathtaking view was taken in total solitude, as in this shot of Lago Sorapis, one of the most crowded places in the Dolomites.

Another piece of advice we want to give you is not to get too attached to a poor photograph only because it took a lot of effort to be shot. The observers will never appreciate your effort behind the photo; they will just observe whether they like the photograph or not.

The photo below, as an example, may fool you into thinking it's an amazing place, but out of the frame there is heavy machinery fixing the banks, a muddy road, and, in the back, a somewhat bare and sad woods.

If you want to improve your composition, you may also want to read our articole about the rule of thirds in photography; you can find it below:

Rule of Thirds and Golden Ratio The Rule of Thirds, the Golden Ratio, and how to balance the framing of your photos. Reading time: 12 min.

Below, you can see another article we highly recommend reading, as its content is deeply related to that of this paragraph.

Telling a Story in Photography Following a theme and telling a story to improve your photographic technique. Reading time: 8 min.

Stereoscopic vision

Everything discussed until now refers to a single image, but there are two eyes, and they are not limited to observing a single snapshot.

Perspective is also something we need to consider in photography. The fact that we can observe with two eyes allows us to understand the depth of the scene. When we take a photograph, we are projecting a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional image, flattening stereoscopic vision.

If the photo lacks clear perspective references, the viewer will not be able to reconstruct the distance of the various elements, and everything will be blurred, as in the image below, whose perspective references have been removed.

Another point to keep in mind is the brain's ability to eliminate distracting elements. If we are looking at something really interesting, we will likely pay little attention to the context where it's placed.

The brain's feature to focus on a single detail in photography doesn't apply; when we look at a picture, we look at it as a whole.

The only solution is cropping, so we can use a tight composition to force the viewers to look only at what we want to show them, framing out distracting elements.

In the image beneath, we have revisited the photo above with a tight crop and vignetting, to draw attention to the bird.

The last point to consider is the senses involved. If you think of a clear memory, as your first car, your partner, a family member, or anything else. What comes to your mind? Definitely an image, but accompanied by a feeling that is related to the emotion that this memory carries.

In fact, the brain tends to store information not as slides, but as stories. The act of associating an emotion with a memory is the job of the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is responsible for transferring information from short-term to long-term memory.

When we take a photograph, all the emotional part of the shot cannot be transferred to the viewer. The viewer of a photograph cannot know what emotions the photographer was feeling when he took the picture, but he usually tends to imagine it through the association of what he sees and his personal experiences. Stop for a second and think about this....

Telling a Story in Photography How to improve our photographs choosing a theme and narrating it with a story. Reading time: 8 min.

Similarities Between The Eyes and a Camera

In this second part we want to concentrate on the differences between looking and taking pictures, in a technical way. We'll understand the way the eyes and cameras work to understand where these two worlds meet and where they diverge.

Anyone who has studied a minimum of photography and has seen an episode of the cartoon Once Upon a Time... Life should have noticed that the way a camera works is very similar to the human eye.

To make it very simple, light passes through a lens and a hole so that it can be projected onto a sensitive wall, impressing it. If we really want to make things trivial, that's the way both eyes and cameras work.

Being more precise, in a camera, light passes through several lens elements inside the camera lens, then is restrained by the aperture of the diaphragm, which opens and closes to determine how much light will pass, then light goes through more corrective lenses onto the film or sensor, which, when impressed, records an image of what was framed. The same happens on your phones, but on a smaller scale.

The eyes work more or less in the same way: light passes through the cornea, then is restrained by the pupil, which opens and closes to determine how much light should pass, then it's projected onto the retina through the crystalline lens. The optic nerve will send to the brain the information about what is being watched.

In the image below you can see a simplified diagram of how the eye works compared to a camera. They are pretty similar, don't you think?

In yellow you can see the light passing through the system of lenses, shown in blue, separated by the aperture, highlighted in green, until it reaches the sensor of the camera, marked in red.

The eye processes light, again in yellow, in a similar way. The rays of light pass through the cornea and the crystalline lens, shown in blue, separated by the pupil, highlighted in green, until they reach the optic nerve, marked in red.

The more observant of you will have noticed that the image will end upside down. This is compensated by the camera's processor and the brain, which process everything to give us a straight image.

The biggest difference between the eye and the camera is that the lens has to move fixed elements to focus. In the eye there are muscles that deform the retina, so a single structure allows focusing at all distances.

Obviously the reality is much more complex than the diagram above. Cameras have batteries, buttons, Bayer patterns, chips, and cables; in the eye there are structures, fluids, muscles, irises, veins, arteries, and much more, but the basic operation is as described. In the image below you can have a more realistic idea of the complexity, but it's only a glimpse; a whole book could be written on this subject.

Eye Technical Specifications

Once we know how it basically works, let's talk about the technical specifications of the eye. This list will create a little misconception, as the specs of the eye are not really impressive. The magic happens in the brain, which can process the information in an impressive way. Let's analyze the tech specs anyway, using photographic terms:

• Sensor size: the retina is a hemisphere with a diameter of about 2.3 centimeters, or 0.91 inch.
• Resolution: the sensitive surface of the retina is divided between cones and rods, so there are about 6 million cones for central vision in color and 120 million rods for peripheral vision in black and white.
• Focal Length: 17 mm to 24 mm, with a great loss of definition moving away from the center.
• Focal Aperture: f/2.1 to f/8.3, with pupil dilation time of about 30 seconds.
• ISO Sensitivity: 50 to 60,000 ISO, with a strong loss of color perception as sensitivity increases.
• Shutter speed: from a minimum of 24 frames per second to a maximum of 300 frames per second.
• Color depth: the visible spectrum varies between 770 and 430 THz, roughly 10 million colors.

So how much is the effective resolution of the eye? We'll go into more detail later, but a rough answer is approximately 6 megapixels for a single glance and 570 megapixels during a full-field observation, moving the eyes and head, because eye movement is a fundamental part of human vision.

Differences between eye and camera

Now that we know some interesting technical data, there's a very important factor to consider. The human eye is only a part of the optical system.

Most of the vision processing is done by the brain, which uses eye movements to create an image like the one we are used to. Without getting too technical, the extent of the visual field is about 140° horizontally and 120° vertically.

Much of this field is handled by the rods, which are specialized in seeing motion but are incapable of clearly recognizing shapes or colors.

Once an object enters the visual field, instinctive movements of the head and the eyes will point to the area of interest, which will be focused by the central part of the retina, which is specialized in recognizing shapes and colors. This area is called "Fovea Centralis" and covers a very narrow field of vision, about 8° horizontally and 6° vertically.

To observe a scene, the eyes alternate between movements and fixations. When we observe, we focus only on a few points that attract the brain, paying little attention to the rest of the scene. the brain merges them into a complete image.

In the example below, you can see an animation we made to give a very indicative idea of how human vision really work.

Generally, each person observes the scene in a unique way, based on what they find interesting. However, in the case of specific requests, people tend to look in a similar pattern. For example, when asked to memorize the clothes or to estimate the age of the people portrayed in a photo. Below you can see an example.

If you'd like to deepen this topic, we recommend reading this article about eye tracking on Wikipedia.

The way we observe compared to a real photograph is completely different. The camera captures a scene; observation is an active operation where the brain uses the memory to combine a very rapid series of glances into a coherent image, with a perfect white balance and dynamic range, way better than any traditional camera.

In a scene illuminated by mixed lighting, a camera will always have two different tones of color. The human brain, on the other hand, is able to automatically combine the white balance of each glance in a perfectly balanced view.

Thanks to this elaboration, it's also possible to have a very high dynamic range. If, for example, we take a photograph of a room with a very bright window, most likely the room will be dark or the window will be overexposed. The eye, on the other hand, takes a snapshot of the window with the correct exposure, followed by a snapshot of the room with the correct exposure, and merges them into a single mental image with the perfect exposure.

All these operations are unconscious and occur instinctively, but they allow us to understand how complex the simple fact of looking at something is.

The modern approch to digital imaging is more and more similar to the way the brain processes the images. Modern phones have incredible cameras, but the tiny size of the sensor is a big limitation. The amazing pictures we can get, especially at night or in backlight, are the result of a lot of post-processing which is automatically done after the shoot by the processor and the algorithms.

Conclusion

We hope you liked this page about observing vs photographing. Before saying goodbye, we would suggest you read our home page, with all the articles we wrote about Cortina d'Ampezzo.

If you want to thank us, you can read the page Support Us. If you only want to suggest a change, propose something, or just say hello, in the section Contacts and Info, you'll find all the ways to reach us.