Dominance

Seeing as I had already written a rough draft for today, I was looking for some eyes to complete the theme. Well, if there is one thing that bugs are good at, it would be eyes, with most bugs having five, arachnids eight and caterpillars twelve or more.

Of all the nine eye shot keepers that I collected, I was drawn to this hopper, which was more of a mouth shot really, but he's got eyes in there so close enough.

Yesterday I asked, 'Do you keep your non-viewing eye open or closed when shooting'?

Of those that responded, the answer was a resounding eye closed, with a few keeping the eye open for action shots or peripheral viewing. A couple of answers were similar to my reasons for change, which made me smile.

I ask because in the last couple of days I have changed from a closed eye to open while shooting bugs up close. The reason was that the squinting and strain of closing one eye seemed to be adding to body tension and contributing towards camera shake. I would very quickly get bored with a shoot, even though I knew that I needed to take a lot more shots to find a good one.

Since I started keeping my eye open, I find that the shoots are less stressed and I can last much longer. I can still see the focal plane just as well as before, in fact, I think I can see it clearer, but that might just be psychological.

Of course being left eye dominant, this is no biggy, seeing that I have half a camera and a fist in front of my right eye, but for the following discussion, I turned the camera to a vertical portrait position, which brings my right eye into the open:

I compared the open/closed idea for distant objects. With the camera in the vertical, the viewfinder was quite confused with each eye's image being a different scale (105mm lens), so I can understand why the right dominant photographers would want to close their left eye.

Open works well for distance, as I use the auto focus. I only need to check the framing whereas in bug macro it is manual focus and the framing is rarely an issue because 95% or more of the images are cropped.

What I found was that when the camera went to my eye, the non-camera eye took dominance, but as the camera object was brought in to focus, my camera eye would take over and 90% of the non-dominant eye's information was ignored by the brain. I also found that I could blink and swap the dominance by forcing my non-camera eye to focus, in which case the brain ignores the camera information. Another blink and the camera eye takes over again. This action being made easier by the fact the two images were at different focal distances and the eyes cannot focus independently.

I think that with some practice, the switching of dominance would become more controllable. I am going to give it a few weeks and see how it goes. If for what ever reason I had to start using my right eye, I would probably manufacture an eye patch that I could flip closed, but this is probably one of those rare instances were lefties actually have the advantage, with the camera design putting a fist in front of my non-camera eye.

To confirm your dominant eye; stare at a distant object, make a circle with index finger and thumb, still focusing on the object, raise the circle until you are looking through. Now close one eye - if the object remains then you are using your dominant eye - if the object steps out of the circle then you are using your weak eye.

Thankyou for your indulgence.

Dave