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Life – Dirtied Light

Posted by kairospix (Singapore, Singapore) on 5 June 2007 in Transportation and Portfolio.

When I took this shot, I had intended to capture the light reflecting off the shiny surface of the rim of the wheel of a tour coach.

With only a small 2 inch LCD viewer on my Canon G6, I hardly noticed that there were lots of tiny smudges of dirt on the rim and had thought I would be getting a nice clean shot of shiny light bouncing off the surface. I guess the bright sunlight reflecting off the rim had probably also made it difficult for me to really see those mini blotches on the surface clearly.

So to my utter disappointment, when I finally open up the photo on my PC, I could see all these tiny patches of dirt and the metal surface was not clean at all.

To be honest, I was debating whether to even post this today as I wasn’t pleased with the fact that the surface was not clear and not as shiny as I had wanted it to be.

But as I thought it over, I realized that even in an imperfect picture, one can learn a thing or two about life. So I decided to post it and share my reflections on it.

First, never assume that what you first perceived is what it is because your biased views may give you a false impression. Our preconceived ideas that we already have in our minds can cause us to wrongly perceive or not perceive what is actually there. That was why I didn’t see the dirt on the rim because firstly they were too tiny to have been perceived on the small LCD viewer of my camera and secondly, all I saw was bright shiny light because that was what I had been thinking of capturing in my mind.

Second, the bright shiny light bouncing off the surface can blind a person from seeing clearly what is actually there. So in a way, when we allow something to become over intense in our lives, it can blind us from perceiving clearly.

Last, but not the least, is the thought that the reason why the shine and reflection on the surface of the rim became unclear was mainly because of the many tiny speckles of dirt left on the surface. A thought struck me that sometimes in our own lives we aren’t shining as clearly as we can be all because we allow tiny patches of dirt to accumulate on the surfaces of our lives. If we would just take time and make efforts to clean away the blotches of dirt, then we’ll be able to shine and reflect more clearly.

Those are the thoughts that came to my mind when I reflected over this "imperfect" shot.

So what about you? What do you see in such dirtied light? :)

Camera - Canon Powershot G6
Lens - Canon 7.2 - 28.8mm (approx. 35 - 140mm)
Capture date - 19 May 2007
Aperture - f 3.0
Shutter speed - 1/1250 sec
Shooting mode - aperture priority
Exposure bias - 0EV
Metering mode - Pattern
ISO - 50
Focal length - 28.8mm (approx. 140mm)
Stabilization - Hand held
Cropped? - Yes
Post-processing? - PS LRoom & CS2 processed
Lighting? - Outdoor Natural Light
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light
g6
dirtied
unclean
unclear