Thursday, January 6, 2011

Life without glasses

No, I'm not getting Lasik eye surgery. However, I wanted to try to capture the world as I see it, without my glasses on. Thanks to manual focus, this is quite easily done. I put on the 50mm lens and decided to aim for the nearest thing to where I was sitting- my collection of cardstock on my desk.

Once I started this task, I realized it'd be so much easier if I had contacts. Then I could just put one contact in the eye looking through the viewfinder, and leave the other eye "blind". But I don't have contacts, so I resorted to wearing my glasses at the most ridiculous angle possible.

So, here's the world as I see it (or fairly closely, anyway), without glasses. I used an aperture of 4.5, since that seemed to give me results closest to how I actually see.

And I figured some context would be good, here's the scene in focus.

Doing this task had me thinking of eye exams and how they are, unfortunately, quite subjective. Not that this was necessarily more objective, but wouldn't it be interesting to go to the optometrist and provide them with a manually focused image of how you actually see life, instead of having to look through the owl eyes and say better, worse, or about the same. Then maybe, somehow they could figure out the numbers behind it and say, oh, your prescription should actually be this and not this. Of course, I don't really know anything about the mechanics of the eye, but it was an interesting thought nonetheless.

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