Decisions, Decisions – A or B, 1 or 2?
I recently went for a routine eye exam, an event not normally one of many surprises, nor worth writing a blog post about. As a typically nearsighted person, I entered the age where my closeup vision requires correction now as well. I once tried a setup where they give me a contact for one eye for distance, and one eye for close up on the suggestion “some people get used to it.” Ha! I gave it about 3 days before I could no longer stand the feeling like there was a constant tug of war going on with my eyes. That led me to multi-focal contact lenses, which like bifocal or progressive glasses, have portion of the lens for closeup and the rest is for distance. Except for contact lenses, instead of a straight dividing line, the difference is the center of the lens vs. the outer edges. It sounds strange, but works surprisingly well. Your brain figures it out pretty quick.
Anyway, contact lens technology or my own vision deficiencies was not my intent for this post, but the exam itself. The portion where the optometrist moves that large contraption, the phoropter, with all the lenses in front of your face. It is the one part of the exam I have always thought was a bit archaic and subjective. Is 1 better or 2? How about A vs. B? Now how about 2 vs. 3? Three vs. Four? By the time the fifth or sixth set of questions come about, my eyes are already fatigued, I am getting annoyed, and I question whether my answers should be given with any credibility. After all, eventually the differences become quite miniscule.
I recognize this IS the point of the test, the narrowing down choices by the process of elimination. It brought to mind a parallel when it comes to developing photographs, especially in the age of the digital darkroom and unlimited undo’s. I pretty much go through the same process when it comes to applying tonal adjustments, dodging, burning, saturation or any number of things with an image. I tweak and ask myself the question – is it better now or before?
Lake Ice Bubbles, Lake St. Clair, MI #IC10239 – The polar vortex temperatures this week had me thinking of ice, but I originally exposed this frame about a year ago.
Sometimes I will push an adjustment to an extreme, and then gradually dial it back. Then turn it on and off – one or two? Three or Four? Now how about A vs. B? You see where I am going with this. Eventually, the differences become quite small. I have reached the point of abandonment.
Ice Bubbles II, Lake St. Clair, Michigan – Once I dialed in the “script” for the first image, it made it easier to apply it to subsequent images.
It’s time to call this one done and move on. Or is it? I have had images where I reached that point of abandonment, but didn’t feel the prescription was correct at all. Decision fatigue settled in, very similar to how it settles in on me during an eye exam. The one test I don’t want to mess up, but with photographs, it becomes part of the creative process. I went down this path of tweaking where it is possible to just get lost. It was no longer A vs. B – they both sucked. When this happens to me, I find I put these photographs away to simmer for a while, maybe days, weeks, years.
As with our own eyes, our prescription aesthetic changes with age. I can no longer use glasses I wore in high school no more than I can tolerate some photographs I made 10 years ago. This decision process of elimination seems to follow us through life as well. If only everything was as simple as a toggle back and forth to pick a preference. We settle in on where we live, who we share our lives with, what we want to do. Maybe some aspects of those lenses are still being flipped back and forth, one vs. two, and that’s OK. Sooner or later, we get the script dialed in just right.
I like the eye exam metaphor. I get pretty focused during those exams because they’re so important. I tried that one contact lens on and one off too, and lasted less than hour! I want to get it perfect in the eye doctor’s exam room but like you said, one’s eyes get strained and we begin to wonder about the very subtle differences, second guessing ourselves. I don’t think it would work in the exam room, but I too like to slide those LR sliders way over sometimes and work my way back – it keeps me from getting into a rut. Ultimately, I guess we have to please ourselves, put it out there, and weigh the reactions and their importance as carefully as we attend to our eyesight and images.
Haha, yeah, I wonder what their success rate is with that one eye near, the other far thing! That is a good practice with LR sliders, I do the same thing myself just as a try to go where I don’t like it, then back it down. thanks for the comments lynn!
Thanks for sharing this – always good to get a confirmation and hear that others are approaching their photos and the process of selection and elimination in a similar fashion. I find that the “Reset” button is the most helpful tool for me (in Lightroom) when my efforts at developing a photo don’t seem to go anywhere satisfying. 🙂
I find myself pushing reset a lot!
Each of us goes through this process in more places in our daily lives than we probably realize…you ought to see me trying to get parked to my satisfaction in a difficult parking spot. Perhaps the scale and the point of abandonment is different for each of us and dependant upon the task but we all do it. Good post, Mark.
I’m pretty sure most people don’t have the experience driving and parking a big truck with a RV attached that you do! 🙂
I was discussing this with my daughter only yesterday. She is learning to colour grade video footage in Da Vinci Resolve (which takes tweaking to a whole other level, I might add), and I could see her struggle with the very decisions you mention in this post and we ended up discussing it on a semi-philosophical level for an hour or more.
I would suggest that this is the artist’s curse to some extent. The more artistic, the more creative a person is, the more they will seek perfection even when they know it is unreachable.
But all is not lost as I come here with a cure, for I do not suffer from this predicament. Here is what I recommend: Work in Information Technology for forty or so years, where the mantra “Close enough is good enough” will be drummed into you ad nauseam and presto! You will never seek perfection again and you may even enjoy churning out mediocre work as a bonus 😉
I think I walked away from my eye doctor appointment with the same attitude – close enough! 🙂 I am lucky the one thing keeping me away from going in deep with video is a very old computer!
Hey Cedric,
My IT shop had a similar mantra, “Good is the enemy of Great.”
Funny you should mention this. I stopped working on a bunch of non-cooperative clouds over an Arizona landscape and was to the point of distraction. So, I searched out a distraction (here) only to be reminded that bouncing back and forth was only satisfying me, no one else would notice. Maybe tomorrow it’ll looked dialed-in. Thanks for the post.
I struggle with this too. When to stop. Is anyone going to notice the little tweak I just made? Or maybe the prescription is all wrong as you say.
I actually was given the wrong prescription in this recent eye exam. The dr concluded my left eye was overprescribed by a whole diopter. Turns out he was wrong, and I had to get everything redone. As frustrating as that was, I can somehow relate to just wanting to start over from scratch. Except the consequences are a lot smaller in redoing a photo vs someone’s eyesight. 🙂