Today, Paul Butzi wrote this post about paying attention. I couldn’t agree more. Paying attention to the world around you is one of the things that will separate you from the rest when it comes to create images.
It actually struck me several years ago in one of my attempts to learn how to draw. I was drawing eyes, noses, mouths and ears. Have you ever tried to get a nose look like a nose? Or maybe make a pair of eyes look like the ones on you model, and not just anyones eyes? The secret lyes in the details. Two different people are often differentiated by very subtle details that our brains are highly tuned to distinguise. Often when you see people of different races, that you aren’t used to see, they all look the same. This is usually not due to ignorance or racism, but just the fact that the differences are so small that you don’t actually see them until you get more training. To draw this, you can’t really rely on your everyday training any more. You have to conciously look for all the details, because if you don’t see them, and translate them down through your hand and pencil down to the sheet of paper, it won’t be there.
In photography, the handeling of these details goes without much trouble. It’s not difficult to make a face recognizable.