The problem with photography these days is that many photographers fail when it comes to looking vs seeing. This is something that the great Mark Seliger understands in a way we don’t really come across often anymore. If you’re wondering what I mean by that statement, you’re hopefully going to get some valuable insight within these next few paragraphs. Humanity is designed to look at a scene and break it down into certain parts. Westerners often fixate on one big thing while those from Eastern cultures tend to look at the whole picture piece by piece. This is why lots of photographers also choose to simply capture what’s in front of them. It’s a much different process than creating. When you photograph something that’s in front of you just the way you see it, you’re capturing. But when you photograph something that you can’t see, you’re often creating. This is one of the many reasons why photographers love Mark Seliger’s work — because of his understanding and mastery of looking vs seeing.
The idea of looking vs seeing is one of the reasons why I use flash and I often encourage the staff at Phoblographer to use flash. When you use an LED, you’re simply capturing a scene that’s in front of you. But when you use a flash, magic happens on set that can’t be seen with the human eye. Both tools are valuable and have their own strengths. But a flash lets you be creative and photography a scene that you see instead of what you’re looking at. An LED doesn’t let you do that in the same way. There are technical reasons for this, but we’re not going to focus on those.
In the image above, I used second curtain flash and a slower shutter speed to get this effect. Charles is tack sharp while the people moving around him, aren’t so. Photographers like Matthew Jordan Smith are also known for doing really fun things like this in public places.
Looking vs seeing requires you to connect the technical side of your brain with the artistic side — which is pretty much what this site always set out to do. In our lead image, you can see two examples of this from the book Mark Seliger: Photographs, which I encourage everyone to buy and analyze when you can. The image on the left is capturing a moment, and therefore looking at it. But on the right, there are lots of elements added into the photo. Mark was seeing a creative vision and made it happen.
Above, we analyze yet another moment where Mark Seliger realized cinematic sight to make this picture. There is light coming from many different places that created a moment. It requires either having a lot of lights come in through the glass or waiting for just the right moment.
This doesn’t have to be solely applied to portraiture though. Every time a photographer does seascape photography with an ND filter and a slower exposure, they create an image that can’t be seen with the human eye. When humans look at a scene in real life, they see the waves crashing on rocks and then moving back out. But they don’t see it slowed down by 5 stops of light at all. Maybe if you’re under the influence of a lot of marijuana might you experience this, but we’ll leave that up to you. Truly, this is a photograph that the creative mind sees and doesn’t look at specifically. And in the end, for us to stand out more as photographers, we have to create more of what we see instead of capturing what we’re looking at.