#380 Hunch

I was watching a young person take a picture the other day. She was hunched over and squinting and holding a small device at arms length. I flashed back to the fifties. My grandmother with her Brownie box camera, peering through an inverted window, hunched over, trying to line up the picture. And the hunch was surprisingly familiar. What goes around comes around as they say, your past comes back to haunt you. Or, if not haunt you, at least remind you that some things really don’t change. Today’s cellphone cameras are the direct descendent of the Eastman Kodak Brownies of long ago, when photography first made its way into the hands of the masses. And it’s only a passing irony that people of today, like me, when I take a picture with my phone, have to adopt the same hunched posture, as I try to line up the picture-viewing window on the phone with what I want the final picture to be. Having gone through the single-lens-reflex period of cameras I still find the method of actually looking at the soon-to-be final picture a little disconcerting, especially since with the old SLRs, my vision and focus issues were not a problem. My bad close vision wasn’t an issue, as I was looking through my close plane of focus to the distant plane of the subject where I could see clearly. Today’s camera phones mean that the image I’m trying to compose is right there. A foot and a half from me, which means that I have to get out my reading glasses just to make sure I have the image aligned properly. And yet the image is of something distant. Which is one of those mysteries that I understand intellectually but never seem to get on a gut level, like when you look at a mirror and focus on the image therein. Now say I have a problem with my distant vision. Things far away are out of focus. I hold up a mirror to that distant object. I can see the mirror clearly because it’s close and I’m holding it. The glass of the mirror is in focus and clear. The edge of the mirror and its handle are crystal clear. But the image in the mirror is blurry. Because it is a reflection of something far away. But the reflection is actually right there. On the same surface as the glass of the mirror. Yet the image in the mirror is unchanged and as if I was looking through a clear lens at the distant object. Funny, one method astronomers use to increase light sensitivity when they are viewing distant stars is highly ground mirrors. You would think that if an image bounced off a mirror it would be less visible, not more so. If only because the image has to take that extra step, like a pool ball bounces off the cushion with less velocity not more. The other method Astronomers use to enhance and capture images is the light gathering CCD, the forerunner of today’s digital camera cellphones. I wonder if they have to hunch over when they use them. Or if they can download supernova noises as ringtones. Phone home…
America, ya gotta love it.