When You Sense Nothing At All

Just by looking on some aspects in our environment, we can tell about an object's size. We may also tell how relatively far it is from the others. These informations depicted in the pictures are called Pictorial Cues.

Once the airplane starts to take off, passengers would notice that structures on the land will look little and little and at the same time getting closer and closer with each other. TEXTURE GRADIENT is another pictorial cue and the one responsible for such perception. This cue is evident in this photo:




According to the TEXTURE GRADIENT CUE, at distance, objects that are equally spaced appear to be closely packed; which is evident from the view inside the airplane that's ascending to the air. These houses and even the SM shopping mall, looks too crowded and compact because the distance between the observer and these objects/structures becomes greater and greater as the airplane flies higher and higher.


Note: Thanks to my brother Marc Elison Capco for taking this photo! ^^,

Last December I went to Zambales with my churchmates/orgmates. We stayed only overnight, but we took a lot of pictures and these are a few of them:

You can’t go on a beach trip without taking jump shots. This is one of the first few pictures we took. And as anyone who’s tried taking a group jump shot knows, it takes a few tries before getting it perfect. The picture on top shows that my two friends are still on the ground while I am in the air. The one on the bottom is a perfect jump shot with all three of us in the air. The shadows on the ground are a cue that none of us are on the ground.

This is a picture of the beautiful sunset. We can tell that my friend on the right side of the picture is nearer than the sea is because his figure is partially covering the view of the sea. Occlusion is the cue that allows us to undertsand this.

We had two bonfires that night, a big one and a mini one. In this picture we can see that the mini-bonfire is farther than the big one because its base is higher than the base of the big bonfire. This pictorial cue is called relative height.

While in the van on the way home, I took pictures of the beautiful scenery we passed by. The bushes in the foreground are blurry while the mountains and sky in the background are clear. This exhibits motion parallax which means that objects nearby seem to move by fast while objects farther away seem to move more slowly.

Reference:

Goldstein, E. B. (2010). Sensation and perception (8^th ed.). California, USA: Wadsworth.

In this photo, the chocolate hill on the tip of my finger appear to be only as big as I am. Then again, is it? According to the cue of Relative Size, when two objects are of equal size, the one that is farther away will take up less of your field of view than the one that is closer (Goldstein, 2009). This is the reason why in the photo, the hill and I seem to be only of equal size because the real distance of the hill is kilometers away from where I was standing.



This picture, on the other hand, shows another depth cue that is Perspective Convergence. Notice the film strips on the floor. They are parallel lines with equal size but as the lines appear farther, the sizes of the lines become different as well. Goldstein (2009) explains that when parallel lines extend out from an observer, they are perceived as converging or becoming closer together as distance increases.

During one of our family trips to Hong Kong, we found these pillars at the museum near Stanley Market.



These picture shows another pictorial cue which is called RELATIVE SIZE.Simply, this cue just means that when one of the two objects with equal size is located farther, it takes lesser of our visual fields and thus is seen smaller. Similarly, the pillars in this photo are actually of equal height but because they stand on different distances, the nearest one looks taller than the rest.

Thanks to my brother Marc Elison Capco for taking this photo! ^^,

Photo taken by: Jay-Ar Alejandro

Try to look at the two vertical lines in the photo above. These are parallel lines. According to Mathematics, two parallel lines will never ever meet. That is true. But, have you ever asked why these lines seem to converge or come together upon looking them at a distance? This is what we call, Perspective Convergence. As distance increases, the more that the observer sees that the two parallel lines seem to converge or come closer together. This is a pictorial cue that provides depth information that can be depicted in the photo. (Source: Goldstein, E.B., Perceiving depth and size. Sensation and Perception. © 2010 pp. 231-232)

In a more realistic setting, this is what exactly happens when one looks at a road or a railway as seen in the photos below.

Photo retrieved from: http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0S0uJy4AERNqdkAgRCbvZx4?vc=&p=road+and+railway&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-701

Photo retrieved from: http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view?back=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3Fp%3Droad%26ei%3Dutf-8%26y%3DSearch%26fr%3Dyfp-t-701&w=700&h=525&imgurl=tommiele.files.wordpress.com%2F2009%2F12%2Froad.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Ftommiele.wordpress.com%2F2009%2F12%2F28%2Fa-prayer-on-the-beginning-of-a-journey-through-cancer-december-28-2009%2F&size=81KB&name=road&p=road&oid=ff771b7fad5051b760220532a412a276&fr2=&no=3&tt=6840000&sigr=13ghqvdph&sigi=11denb65k&sigb=12i27bu0g&.crumb=YSSsOX4zIXL

Last month, I spent my holidays in Japan with my boyfriend. A couple of days before Christmas, we hit the road and went to Tokyo to go to Sanrio Puroland (Yes, someone was coerced to go!).

This was a picture I took on the way to Tokyo. Motion parallax occurs when objects that are nearby appear to glide rapidly past as while objects farther away appear to move more slowly (Goldstein, 2010). If you notice -- the blur on the truck is greater than that of objects near the horizon (the bridge, the billboard sign...).

Furthermore, it illustrates perspective convergence. It's when parallel lines are perceived as converging as distance increases (Goldstein, 2010).

The emergence of high-tech cameras made pictures more vivid, more real and more interesting. From filmed cameras to digital ones, nowadays, a lot of people are crazy over DSLRs. I am really hopeful that I can own one too but having one is really costly.

I was once a fan of pictures especially when I joined the site Multiply six years ago. Taking pictures of almost everything around me including all the details makes me happy. Yeah, I think the saying "a picture paints a thousand words" is true. Looking back at all the pictures I took before takes my stress away. I get to reminisce the days when I was at my happiest. Aside from that, some random shots make me appreciate the beauty of the things that was once around me.

I took this picture last New Year while we're on a long drive from Subic, Zambales to Manaoag, Pangasinan in one of my favorite expressway - the SCTEX. We were lucky to be traveling in such a lovely sunny day.

Looking at the picture, Do you ever wonder if the road is really getting narrower as seen in the picture? Or are the light posts shorter as we get farther? When I was a kid, I was actually looking for possible answers to my question but these interesting things are explained through science. These are some of the examples of monocular cues. The road getting narrower is an example of perspective convergence. Parallel lines seem to be closer together as the distance increases. The light post is an example of relative height. The lamps have the same height but they seem to be shorter as the distance increases.

I'm really glad that cameras were invented. Imagine life without cameras. Well, we could live with it but we can't clearly recall all the beautiful things that we saw. The world is beautiful and I'm glad we have eyes and cameras to see it all the time.

With the latest technology and newest all-in-one gadgets, taking pictures is becoming one of the hobbies, not just of the youth Filipinos, but seemingly of most of the people today. Different poses, different angles, wacky facial expressions, peace/victory signs, and other creative shots-- taking pictures is just so enjoyable that most people take perceptual cues in their photo for granted. We don't usually wonder why a particular object is perceived farther than another as it is shown in the picture. Yet how come we automatically understand the relative distances of the objects we see-- in this case not just in the photos but also in our environment?

Goldstein (2010) explains that it is so because we learn to perceive depth from our previous experiences. According to the cue approach to depth, in our previous experiences, we had encountered a number of signals or cues which tells us that an object is farther or nearer than the other. One of this cues is the ATMOSPHERIC PERSPECTIVE.

See and observe this picture:


If you look closely at this Bataan beach photo, there is a mountain in it. However, due to the dust, water droplets, and airborne pollution present in the atmosphere, the mountain appears hazy and bluish. This photo exemplifies the atmospheric picture which is a cue that farther objects appear less sharp and most of the time bluish-- which is because of the elements mentioned earlier.

Reference:
Goldstein, E. Bruce (2010). Sensation and perception, 8th edition. California, USA:
Wadsworth

Thanks to my brother Marc Elison Capco for taking this photo! ^^,

Have you ever wonder how you can tell whether an object is near or far? Or how you can say that one building is taller than the other, even if in a distance they both seem to have the same height? The answer lies in Perceptual Cues. These are bits of information that we get from the object, scene or illustration that guides our perception of depth (Goldstein, 2010). Let’s take this picture for example:

Just by looking at the image, it appears that the hand is so big as to hold the girl’s body. Is there really a hand as big as the average person? Or is there really a person as small as a hand? The perceptual cue of Familiar size makes use of our knowledge and past experiences on the real size of objects, and uses this to infer the distance of objects (Goldstein, 2010). In the example, we can infer that the woman is placed far enough from the hand to make its image appear as small as that of the hand. Because in reality, we know that a person and a hand cannot be in the same size unless Dwarfina or Thumbelina comes to life.

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Goldstein, E. B. (2010). Sensation and perception (8^th ed.). California, USA: Wadsworth.