Sunday, October 7, 2012

Perception of Light

The most interesting and thought provoking statement in the article for me was that ‘vision is only possible because there are constraints in the world’. I immediately started to try to mentally disprove this with various examples which was impossible, but it made me really think about it. So the ‘high level vision’ that incorporates knowledge about a finite number of options has to kick in to inform the ‘low level vision’ which provides information about light within a restricted environment.  The middle level vision is the rest in-between. Otherwise I had difficulty with sections of the article because I needed a better understanding of the technical vocabulary.

The other terms I did understand as they describe different things: luminance as the amount of visible light entering the eye form a surface; illuminance as the amount of light on a surface, and reflectance as the amount of light reflected from a surface. However, I had some trouble with the application of these definitions as I tried to guess how p, q, and r on the checker block related to each other in accordance with these terms and was regularly wrong.

As far as a real life example, I wonder if these principles affected my results from this week’s assignment. I generally paint in the morning by natural light from a north facing window. However, later in the day some of the colors looked really different when at the time of painting I was very comfortable about how the color-aid swatches matched my paint mixtures.  It was variably cloudy all day, and since I was at it for hours I’m thinking the amount of light influenced all of my decisions; my color-aid selections, the paint mixtures, and how they matched each other within a given time-frame.

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