[stylist] Blindness and photography

[Jewel S.]

The way I see it, many blind people are not totally blind. Quite a few
have some sort of usable vision. My boyfriend is one such example, as
am I. He has enough vision that he can use a CCTV to read things. We
found that using the handheld CCTV (Amigo), he could freeze the screen
over an object to take a "picture" of it, then magnify it and put it
on the TV if necessary to be able to see it. I think having a digital
camera and a large screen TV would be really great for him, because
then he would be able to see things that are quite small normally, but
he could blow it up to a size wher he could see it (for example, a
pretty bouquet of crepe myrtle flowers or the painting on a decorative
plate.

I have heard of some blind photographers doing so for the simple
reason of magnifying the picture to be able to see the faces of family
and friends. I know my boyfriend would be able to do this. I really
would give near anything to be able to do the same. Sadly, my vision
is not good enough for that.

At this point, my vision is almost exclusively light and colour
perception. However, as I can see colour, a high contrast image is
still something of a beauty to me. As an example, there is a blind
painter in Texas who did a painting called Eyes. It is purely black
and white, and very high contrast. It is very lovely to my eyes, if
magnifyed gratly.

For myself, I would love to be able to take pictures to share my life
with ffamily that I do not see often. Most of my family is in
Lousiana, and others are in Arkansas, South Dakota, Texas, and
overseas. I do not get to see them often, and they have not seen any
pictures of me in several years. I would love to be able to take
pictures of myself and things in my life (like my cat when she is in
one of her silly poses, or my boyfriend asleep with his dog laying
across his chest with a cute look on his face) to send to my family
and friends. Just because I am blind doesn't mean I don't understand
the importance of sharing images from my life with my sighted family
and friends. I know pictures are important to sighted people, having
been one myself for 23 years, and I wish to share images from my own
life with others.

My two cents,
Jewel

On 8/8/10, Joe Orozco <jsorozco at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I haven't followed this thread.  Forgive me if this has already been raised,
> but how exactly do blind people know how to gauge the quality of their
> product?  This can't possibly be something one can independently measure
> without sighted assistance, and at that point, doesn't it become
> counterproductive?  If pictures are taken for posterity, wouldn't a person
> want that to be preserved at its best?  I'm not bashing it, because I
> genuinely don't know how blind people would do it.  I'm open to
> enlightenment, though I'm scanning through my e-mail and see that the topic
> has been bounced about quite a bit already.
>
> Joe
>
> "Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves,
> some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all."--Sam Ewing
>
>
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-- 
~Jewel
Check out my blog about accessibility for the blind!
Treasure Chest for the Blind: http://blindtreasurechest.blogspot.com