When your computer can’t make sense out of the instructions or data that is being fed to it, the machine will refuse to go any further, sometimes with a “program error” message but often by simply crashing.
Images are instructions or data that you feed into your brain via your eyes. Good pictures are constructed in such a way as to generate a particular, targeted response. Bad pictures either don’t do what they were intended to do (they load, but don’t perform) or the brain refuses the input (it makes no sense).
In photography, clarifying ones intent is usually the hard part. Straight photographs, by definition, are of real scenes. This is not so in compositing. If you want to contrive realistic scenes ‘by-hand’ you have to work to make them stay within the bounds of believability.
This is a black/white, yes/no zone. There is no gray area. My test is to see if I feel that I can ‘go there’ by which I mean, can I step into the scene that I have made, or not? This is not a rational response. I can do completely unrealistic things in a picture and still feel that it is continuous with my own reality. I like to play right at the very edge of this reality limit; in many of my composites, that tension or uneasiness is the force that makes the picture interesting to me.
Oddly, this irrational continuity/reality boundary is not limited to pictures; it happens in real life. For example, I have never gotten the 9/11 events to ‘compute’. I understand them, I’ve seen videos, stills, news reports, etc. and there is no question that those things happened. It’s when I try to put it into the continuity of my own autobiography that it doesn’t fit. Ditto for the Asian tsunami that happened a few years ago.
Even something that I have experienced directly can be rejected due to discontinuity. This summer, mid-June, while hiking with one of my Jack Russells, I was charged by a mother bear. Because I was in a road cut into the side of a steep mountain and she and the dog (who had treed her cub) were out of sight, above me, the only thing that I could, at first see, was the cub up the tree – but that was enough for me to know that I had a problem.
Seconds later, the dog came tearing down the nearly vertical bank back to me. Immediately behind her was the bear (growling). But here is where it goes discontinuous. Because she was going so fast, because the bank was so high and so steep, or, I don’t know, because she was really Super-Bear in disguise, rather than running down the bank, she jumped. I mean, she flew. Totally airborne. Way up in the sky, and coming right for me.
After landing, she never did slow down, but at the last minute (very, very close; I distinctly remember thinking “this is really going to hurt”) she swerved slightly to my right and then looped back up onto the ridge.
I have no problem with seeing a bear (I hike a lot; I see bears fairly often), no great problem with being charged (it has happened to me before). It’s the airborne thing that won’t compute. My brain just will not take that one. I feed it the visuals (which are wonderfully clear) and I think, that’s cute, but it’s not real. I do not have flying bears in my world.
Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein famously argued back and forth on whether/how/if we could deal with reality that we could not conceive of (reference quantum theory and wave-particle duality). Bohr felt that science, at that level, had bumped up against a fundamental limitation and that we (or they; I have no clue…) should stick to experience (data/results from experiments) and give up the whole idea of ‘knowing’ reality.
In image-making, it’s the reverse. We have to stick to the idea of a reality continuous with our own.
