The title only states the obvious, but let's take a deeper dive in that thought. Look at the picture above. There is nothing much in it, just some lights with their reflections in the windows and a woman walking underneath them. if you saw this moment in real life it wouldn't even catch your eyes, because it is something very mundane, just a person doing nothing more interesting than walking. But for some reason - stopping the moment changes the way we see it. Perhaps it's because we can't see it like this in real life. We can't stop moments with magic, we can't even do that with our minds, because memory is unreliable and even if we try to remember a certain moment it keeps shifting and moving. I even took out the colors leaving less to take in, but there is something about it that sets a mood and enough to see it as more interesting than that moment actually was. I think that is part of the reason why we like photos so much. One more thing that photography allows us is to see a bigger part of the world in focus. You are able to look at the picture and see a lot more in focus than you could in real life. Let me prove my point - take a look at anything further away from you and notice how little you actually can focus on at one time - you'll notice that our eyes can only focus on little spots and everything else we see is blurry - our peripheral vision allows us to see just enough to notice movements and things like that, but it is far from perfect (far from good actually). But if you look at a picture in your phone or computer monitor it is small enough to keep it all in focus. That is how photography can help us see the world differently.
I'll give you another sample.
The picture below looks more or less how you would see that moment if you were walking around. (It would actually be wider and you should be tilting your head slightly)
Now take a look at the one below
It is the exact same picture but all the boring stuff is removed leaving the essence of the moment. Removing the colors (I believe) removes distracting colors.
If you don't care about the noise from hard cropping you could crop it down even more to put emphasis on something.
You just simply can't do that without technology or art and I think that it is beautiful.
Please leave a comment and share your thoughts on why you think people like photos. I know there is a lot more than what I wrote in this post and I think I will keep posting my thoughts about this subject in the future, just because there is so much more to say.
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