Heroes Not Zombies

These two images were taken within seconds of each other. Both are a picture of the full moon through the branches of a tree.

But they look very different don’t they?

In the first one, the tree is to the fore. We notice the pattern of twigs, buds and branches, with the full moon as a white, circular background. If you look carefully, you can even see different colours, some reddish, some bluish, in the tree….although I’m still not sure where those colours came from!

In the second one, I’ve allowed the light of the moon to dominate, whiting out the tree in front of it….almost completely, but what this has done is reveal the parts of the tree lit by the moon, but just outside of the intense white light of the moon itself. This does two things…..it creates a sense of a swirling circle of branches around the moon, with an opening in the tree which just happens to be moon-shaped. This is an illusion – there is no moon-shaped gap in the tree.

I love both of these images, and don’t actually have a preference, but I realise that just by altering the exposure setting in the camera, I alter the entire frame of the shot….and that the two different frames give very different experiences of reality.

That’s what frames do. They shape our experience of reality. The frames we use all the time are fashioned out of our beliefs, values, habits of thoughts, and established attitudes. They aren’t easy to change. They aren’t even that easy to see. But I think it’s important to try to become aware of them, given how powerfully they shape our perception of reality.