[nabs-l] Taking pictures

[Angela fowler]

How would you do that? I've tried to take pictures, and its pretty
frightening.  

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of T. Joseph Carter
Sent: Monday, May 25, 2009 7:40 AM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Recording NABS meeting

Peter,

I've seen what passes for art produced by at least one totally blind
photographer.  It was indistinguishable from the type of work of a couple of
other art photographers whose work was offered as a comparison.  Not a one
had anything in focus or well-framed.  I mean, I take far better pictures
than that!  Of course, that's why I'm not considered an "artist", I guess.
*grin*

That said, I know a couple of other blind photographers whose work comes out
pretty nicely, and I must use alternative techniques myself when doing
anything with a camera outside on a sunny day since in that condition I
literally have no vision either.  About 2/3 of my shots look something like
I intended--though I sometimes need to tweak the color histogram to get the
colors to look like they should since I have to depend on a lot of automatic
settings.

Joseph


On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 12:38:06AM -0500, Peter Donahue wrote:
>Hello Christopher and listers,
>
>    On the surface this is true, but if you would but experament as 
>we're doing here you might be pleasantly surprised by how much digital 
>photography and video work we can do nonvisually as I'm now 
>discovering. Several of the sites I manage contain pictures taken by 
>blind persons with little to no vision. They found alternative 
>techniques to use for "Getting that perfect shot" and preparing photos 
>for a Web Site or other presentation. I personally know some of them 
>and talked withthemabout their techniques for taking pictures.
>
> I have some vision, but more often than not I fall back onaa 
>mnon-visual method for doing tasks such as manipulating photos to 
>prepare for the Web and for other presentations. A knowledge of 
>photographic techniques will allow you to figure out how to do tasks 
>such as resizing photos and pasting them in to text documents such as 
>those created with Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat. There are some 
>tasks that will require sighted assistance, but again a thorough 
>knowledge of photography could help you find work-arounds for them. 
>Want to avoid pixcelation in photos. Don't enlarge them excessively. No
vision required.
>
>    If we can find ways to take pictures and digitally process them for 
>display the next logical step would be davveling in to the World of 
>digital video. On the surface one is lead to think that there's no way 
>for a blind person to shoot video sequences. I think there's one 
>Raymond Kurzweil whose all ready working on that problem in relation to the
Kurzweil NFB Reader.
>Future versions of the reader will include object recognission and 
>eventually the ability to describe the location and movements of people 
>and objects in a particular location.  Perhaps this technology will 
>eventually find its way in to video cameras to assist sighted 
>videographers as well as aspiring blind ones.
>
>    If we would just think out of the box we might figure out ways 
>blind people can shoot video until this technology is perfected.
>
>    Just as with preparing still photos there are tasks that would be 
>visual in nature in the digital video World. One that comes to mind 
>off-hand is being able to sinc audio recordings with video sequences. 
>For example if you're filming a documentary that shows a whale 
>breaching you need to be sure the viewer hears the splash when the 
>whale hits the water and sees it visually. It would be rather amusing 
>if The splash was heard when the whale is still under water. But 
>perhaps here too there may be a nonvisual solution. Some of us are 
>learning how to sinc text documents with audio when creating digital 
>talking books. This is done by placing markers in the audio files that 
>correspond with text files of the DAISY document. A similar process is 
>used to link audio and visual eents in a video. This now leaves us with 
>just the need to visually verrify that the sincing is correct, and that 
>the appearance of the video is of a high quality. There's always the good
old team approach to surmount this obstacle.
>
> The moral of the story is that if we imagine ways to do what we wish 
>to do in life there are ways for a blind person to achieve the 
>seemingly unachievable and do the seemingly undoable. Okay you aspiring 
>vlind videographers let's develop the techniques so we can show and 
>tell them how it's done!
>
>Peter Donahue

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