Day 16 of 2019 Project 365: While my wife drove to Target to help our child return a defective television, I sat in the passenger seat experimenting with the focusing and depth of field settings on my iPhone 11 Pro. I had some fun.
I keep repeating, but I had orbital decompression surgery on Monday. My face, especially around my eyes, looked like I had a rough night at fight club. After a week of alternating use of an ice pack for twenty minutes on, and twenty minutes off, and lots of bed rest, and being mentally unfocused due to strong pain medications, I can finally see out of both eyes. I am still on several medications, including whole-body anti-biotics and in-eye anti-biotics which I apply three times a day to both eyes. I have a double vision which the doctors expect will go away on its own or I will require additional surgery. I'll know more at my post-surgery appointment on Monday.
This week, I had not expected to submit a post for Frank's Photo Challenge. Until today, I had not even thought about the weekly challenge. I was focused on recovering from surgery. But I was skipping through the WordPress Reader, with a patch over my left eye, and saw a response to the photo challenge and out of curiosity, I looked for this week's keyword and started laughing. Focus!!
Due to cataract surgery on my left several years ago, I had to choose the type of lens I wanted. I opted for distance vision. With the left eye, I can focus on objects that are further than two meters or more from my sight. Soon after that, I had laser surgery, phase reactive keratotomy, in my right eye, which allows me to focus on the nearby objects that are two-metres or less from my right eye. My brain combines both images to enable stereoscopic vision so that I can drive safely, read a screen, a book, and watch a movie.
Of course, seeing two of every car as I drive isn't ideal. With my post-surgery diplopia, I can't focus on anything in front of me unless I close one of my eyes. My wife gave me an eye-patch to alternately cover each eye. But when you can see out of one eye only, you lose stereoscopic vision and the ability to determine depth.
So what to do? I wanted to submit an entry.
I decided to save up my energy; it takes a lot out of me to cover one eye long enough to type these words so that I could submit two images. I captured both pictures on my Fujifilm X-T2 with a manual focus 35mm film lens, my Asahi SMC Takumar 55mm f/2. For the first image, I used the focus-peaking feature of the Fujifilm X-T2 to help me find the proper focus for the image. For the other, I focus on using just my eyes. I expect one image is sharper than the other.
The out-o-focus image is a decent depiction of what my vision was like a day after surgery.
I used Luis Costa's monochrome film simulation recipe, which I found via Ritchie Roesch's [Not] My Fujifilm X-Pro2 Tri-X Push-Process Film Simulation Recipe
post. The last time I shot a monochrome film was in college in the mid-'80s. I don't remember explicitly shooting Tri-X, but I do remember capturing a lot of monochrome images. I don't know if this Tri-X recipe is close to Tri-X or not, but I like the way it looks.
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... the daguerreotype put an end to the portrait making business as it was known to the world. Skilled painters, who previously were the only means of creating a likeness of one’s self, were suddenly squeezed by the faster and cheaper process. Not only was the daguerreotype literally faster and easier to create than a painting, the operator didn’t need to have any particular talent other than being able to follow directions and do some mathematical computations to mix chemicals. They didn’t need to spend years cultivating their art and style and studying methods. And they surely didn’t need the underlying “spark” or “raw talent” that is often associated with painters or sculptors. By the 1860’s, much of the portrait painting industry was gone and those that did still have their paintings commissioned often did not sit for their painting sessions, but instead sent their painter a daguerreotype to work from.Lisa Robinson
OMG! I see some parallels to modern digital photography and smartphones. In case you don't know it, the daguerreotype is "a photograph taken by an early photographic process employing an iodine-sensitized silvered plate and mercury vapor."
... the next time you look up from that proposal on the new infrastructure schematics and see that the sun is shining, go for a walk, notice where you are, and give your mind a chance to go into diffuse-mode and process what you’ve been focusing on all morning. And give yourself a hug for doing it.Farnam Street
