This is an experiment in perception. One of my favorite photos is of a dead pine tree [Is that significant? Why a dead pine? Couldn’t I find a live one anywhere?] on Miyajima Island, near Hiroshima. You can see a cropped image of it on the Images page, and click on it to zoom in. In reality, it’s one tiny section of a rain-swept, foggy 20MP shot taken from a cable-car (see directly below).
My eye thinks it can see the tree’s bark and its individual orange-brown needles, but in truth they just aren’t there. If you zoom in a bit more, the realistic-looking texture breaks up into blocks of individual pixels—a tree branch becomes abstract art. Blow it up all the way, and the blocks begin to resemble stacks of Legos—pretty in an abstract way, but hardly resembling the tree my mind sees.
There’s a metaphor lurking here somewhere. I found the tree striking, standing in the midst of a sea of green and gray. I had one chance to take the shot, under less than ideal conditions—pouring rain, swaying cable-car, a miserly 3.8x telephoto lens, cable and other obstacles crowding the frame. But I knew the chances of passing by again were vanishingly small—if nothing else, the tree or its fiery needles might be gone by the time I chanced across it again. So I took the shot and hoped for the best. When I got back to Seattle, I put the tree image on my business cards. That’s a mundane use, but that same image also dances in the imagination, and it holds a cautionary reminder for me:
If I wait for perfection, I might miss out on the merely wonderful.
