The other day I began thinking about a subject that has been in the back of my mind for a long time: blindness. My eyes aren’t all that great, needing strong corrective lenses, and they’re gradually getting worse – one day, at some point in the future, the photography will halt, though this is likely to be far enough away that I’ll have retired from everything else as well.
But there have been plenty of times, long before I was serious about photography, that I’ve wondered about blindness, and how it affects certain perceptions of the world. Some time back, I ran across the challenge to describe color to a blind person, which I like to think I could manage, but the real test isn’t what I think of it, it’s whether a blind person seems to understand the concept, which isn’t an opportunity that has arisen. But I often walk around the place in the dark or with my eyes closed, comfortable with where things are and, if I’m any judge, with a pretty solid concept of spatial relations – I can put my hand directly on most doorknobs, know how many steps it is between the bathroom and bedroom, and so on.
I haven’t made a huge effort to make the site disabled-friendly, partially because I really don’t know what’s optimum, but largely because, as a photography-related site, much of the content is lost without the visual. I have toyed with the idea of images produced as etchings or bas-reliefs, but I suspect this really wouldn’t be much good; a scenic shot represents a visual field, subjects at varying distances that are entirely outside of the experience a sightless person would have.
Which led, herewith, to an exercise. I randomly selected an image from my ‘Scenic/Abstract’ stock folder to attempt to describe in the terms that a blind person might experience. Since you have never seen the image, you can play along.
It’s outdoors. The air is exceptionally still and quiet – no bird noise or barking dogs, no lawnmowers or yard noises, few traffic sounds. The air is also slightly chilly, with a faint hint of humidity, like immediately after a rain. The grass underfoot, however, feels dry and solid, not sodden.
A car approaches, from behind and to the left. It’s going slower than normal, clearly traveling on asphalt. It passes by on the left, but as it recedes into the distance it crosses over towards the right. The sound seems slightly muted – less echo than has been experienced elsewhere. After it passes, the faint turbulence of its passage follows behind, weak enough to indicate, along with the sound, being a small distance from the road. The sound of the car disappears into the distance without distinctive changes in pitch; the car did not turn or stop within hearing distance. No other car passes.
There is no warmth from the sun, and only the faintest of breezes. Close to the right, tiny rustles from both near your feet and high above indicate close trees, and occasionally one creaks slightly in the middle distance – there seems to be a treeline alongside. Identical sounds, fewer and fainter, come from the opposite direction – the trees are either fewer there, or farther away. Given the road sound and the turbulence from the car, they are likely on the far side of the road.
What this highlights, hopefully, is that the non-visual representation has to produce the same ‘sense of place’ that our visual cues provide – but some of the things that strike us visually will not produce the same reaction when described. The interplay of light on the snow of the distant mountain peak, a classic scenic image, has no effect on the blind; the awe that they feel comes from other senses. This is not to say that they cannot get the full effect from being in certain locales; aside from the impossibility to know just what anyone else feels, those with sight have a tendency to rely on it strongly, while those without get more information from their other senses. A blind person on a mountain overlook can feel the cool wind coming out of the valley below, hear the air tearing through the trees in the distance coming from very atypical angles (both above and below,) smell the incredible mix of scents produced by thousands of plants and snow, might even get a sense of unease from the rough rock surfaces underfoot. All of these can be rare or unique, and thus provoke a strong response when encountered.
Shall we try another? Remember, this is just as much an exercise for me as for anyone reading.
The air is cool but not cold, noticeably humid, largely still. No sunlight can be felt. The sound of running, splashing water comes from directly ahead, at least twenty paces off; more sounds of water, these very minor, comes from just off to the right at your feet. There is the sound of the wind in the trees, but it’s moderately distant, well above your head, in marked contrast to the stillness of the surrounding air. There is a faint smell of vegetation, but a sharper smell of wet rocks, with a hint of lichen or fungi. The ground underfoot is rock, mostly smooth, but not finished in any way, faintly uneven and studded with the occasional pebble.
The sound from the splashing water has an echo to it, coming most strongly from the left side, extending almost overhead; the effect is perhaps slightly noticeable to the right, but without distinctive direction. The sound of the wind and the echos do not overlap in the slightest. The occasional birdsong can be heard, but always to the right.
Crouching to feel around your feet, you quickly find water lapping against the rock you’re standing on, in the direction of the splashing sound, but the water itself is smooth and undisturbed, a pool. It becomes clear this is the source of the trickling sound to the right. Behind you, the wind noise is more distinct, no longer over your head but even extending down below your level; birdsong can be heard in all directions that way.
Behind you, above and to the left, voices can be heard approaching, and the odd scuffs of feet on uneven surfaces – perhaps ten or so paces away. The sounds descend as they come closer and the people pass behind, giving you some space; the scuffing continues and the position varies in height, sometimes lower than you are, sometimes higher. Their unevenly spaced footfalls and the widely varying time between steps makes it clear that the surroundings are very uneven. The echo from the left and above is very pronounced with the voices, becoming sharp every time someone speaks a bit louder. They never pass in front of you, and barely even get alongside, moving away to the right.
Now, I cheated a little bit here, perhaps – I didn’t stick with what was immediately apparent in the image, but extended it to the surroundings not visible, trying to replicate the entire sense of place that someone without sight would have. They also would have had more of an idea of terrain from having to get to that location, but now we’re going outside of the immediate impact of the ‘scene’ and into the entire experience of the trip. Should that count?
I’m not going to come this far without including the images for comparison, but I’m not going to insert them in the post to be seen easily; instead, I’ll provide a link. Go ahead and revisit the descriptions again to fix the ideas in your mind, then click here for the image from the first description, and here for the second. Or don’t, if you want the full experience, some of the mystery that remains for those without sight. [I’ll note that I actually rejected one of my random selections from the folder, because it was an abstract of a very close subject and could easily have been determined by feel.]
How close was your impression? Was time of day evident from the cues in the description? Did you notice how much of certain portions were never described, because they would have produced no impact to someone without sight?
And of course, how much did I actually miss? I wasn’t paying particular attention to all of the aspects when taking either of these images, so I attempted to reconstruct what I believe I could have sensed when there. Fog and snow mute sounds in curious ways, but the lack of wind noises during fog is actually indicative of the conditions, since it’s rare otherwise. The cue about the echoes I have indeed experienced, as has nearly everyone; we can tell when a recording is made in a small room with hard walls or floor, and can often tell when someone we’re speaking with on the phone walks into a bathroom or outdoors.
[I have a distinctive memory of horsing around with friends in our barn when I was younger, at night without lights – this was a place I knew intimately, but not quite well enough to know exact distances to certain features. I stepped back, and abruptly my voice echoed directly into my ear on one side; I was only centimeters away from a wooden support column, just shy of smacking my head against it. It was a great reminder that we can pick up more of our surroundings without vision than we often realize.
Now something else I’ll note, while on the subject. Sound travels at roughly 340 meters per second, meaning it takes 0.002938 seconds to travel a meter. When we hear the echo from a small room, it is the sound repeating perhaps just 0.01 seconds after the origin; when I heard the echo from the column, it was an echo well less than 0.0014 seconds later – we can actually distinguish time frames this short by ear. The old style monitors with cathode ray tubes (the bulky ones) and non-flat TVs would redraw their images 60 times a second, with black areas in between. This meant each individual image would last roughly 0.01 seconds (counting black redraw buffers) and few people would notice any flicker or delay at all – our ears are better at timing small delays than our eyes.]
But anyway, all of this is simply an exercise in perspective and assumptions. I will never know what being blind from birth is like – even if I lose my sight entirely, I will always build a visual representation in my mind. And a sightless person will never know what vision is like, and what is drawn from it. This isn’t about limitations, however – it’s about changing a frame of reference, and contemplating how much all of our senses contribute to our perception of environment. There are dramatic landscapes for all of us, but some are very different in nature.
I’ve seen before the kind of dancing she did while grounded, and knew as she returned to another branch that she’d caught something. In this case it was a small 
Richard Dawkins used it extensively in 
Protective herds are, of course, a behavior that has been selected for, as are the protective instincts of the parents – these evolved right alongside all other traits, and each one has an impact. What this means is that survival of the genes relies on many points of convergence, so any one selective factor – predators, food sources, climate, etc. – has only a partial effect on the process. What selection produces is not an ideal organism, but one that balances both environmental influences and the random genetic changes that occur into something that, on average, works better than before. It’s actually pretty haphazard and slow, which is what’s fascinating about it, because the species we see now had to be shaped by millions of causes over long periods of time.
Which brings us to the gene level, where deliberate language is a major factor of confusion. Genes do not do anything except spark the development of proteins under certain conditions; they are far less active than a grass seed that germinates when surrounded by adequate moisture and nutrition, and are much more like an alarm clock that rings at certain times. Their propagation in any species relies on the survival of the individual that possesses them, and the lottery that may just drop them out in favor of the gene from the other parent, or the rare mutation that occurs. When a new gene mutation provides some slight advantage in survival or reproduction, it stands a better chance of getting to offspring, and in multiple generations of this process, it can become more prevalent in the gene pool of the species, first in a local group, and eventually in time throughout the entire population. The gene does not try to survive; it does not survive at the expense of others; it does not compete. Natural selection sees that tiny advantages can add up over time – again, on average. Note that it is not just the singular gene that propagates from any advantage it might provide to an organism – every gene that the organism possesses at that time, including the detrimental ones, gets selected and is along for the ride. The detrimental ones may also prevent the beneficial ones from propagating as well; it all depends on what the nature of each trait is, and whether it has a significant effect on the reproduction of the individual.
I think it snowed early this morning just to offer a counterpoint to the pics from yesterday morn. This is the first of the season here, and no, I don’t really count this as snow; not from having grown up in central New York, and not in comparison to many other parts of the country right now. We have often had much heavier snowfalls than this by this time of year, so it just reflects how lucky we’ve been here. I’m not gloating, even though it’s true that I moved south largely to escape winter weather. While I’m not fond of cold, I can hack it reasonably well. It was the expectation that inclement weather was supposed to have no effect on school or work that was most disagreeable, and after several years, multiple minor vehicle damages and one major one, and having to pull a faulty pump from our well in arctic conditions, I figured it was time to get out.
Most (perhaps all) bird species congregate in flocks, primarily because they gain a huge protective advantage from the multiple opportunities to spot danger and alert all others, additionally because their food sources tend to come in large amounts of seeds, berries, or even schools of fish, so there is more benefit from feeding among the others than competition from doing so. They also have to care for their young in the early stages, so often form parental bonds to share the workload. Birdsong is largely related to territory, part of the competition that they do face amongst themselves, which is reproduction. And this reproduction produces an extensive behavior all its own, that of selecting a mate that appears better than the rest, which fostered various displays of fitness in the form of plumage, shelter construction, and the song repertoire of an experienced survivor. People familiar with pet birds can usually see this difference in sociability, often misinterpreted; birds like their heads and backs scratched mostly because their new feathers itch and cannot be reached there, and prefer to perch on shoulders because it’s a dominant position.
Almost anyway. The image above is actually edited to remove the faint evidence of the nature photographer’s bane: electrical lines. There are actually very few places in the US that are free from wires, poles, and towers, making any kind of landscape shots tricky, and this is especially true for the front yard – I’ve done no small amount of repositioning in an attempt to get something interesting in the sky without those damn wires. Seen here is the untouched version, with faint but noticeable streaks on the left side. Wielding the smudge tool in Photoshop was enough to hide them, though if you compare the two, you can still see some hints – without the comparison they really don’t attract attention. While I was at it, I did a slight color tweak towards red. But go back to last winter’s image and notice how the background looks so much better here; this is why I wanted to redo the shot.
Sunrise also brings another bane of landscape photographers in many parts of the country: jet contrails. Between the sudden surge of departing flights and the light angle that makes them stand out starkly against the sky, you can almost forget about including the sky in images taken from some locales. I think most times people tune them out while taking photos and never notice when they’re in the frame, but they provide a strong contrast element that is immediately noticeable in the resulting image. I shot this one just as an example of why I can’t work from the yard too much, even when I have nice foreground subjects. Soon afterward, the cold air had dropped the power curve in the batteries too low to be effective and the camera died. I could have swapped them out for a warm, fully charged set, but I had already lost the light quality and those contrails were only going to increase in size and number.