First of all beyond lenses there are fundamentally not repersentational limitations such as dimension (3d vs 2d) and other experiences. If a kid slips into our field of vision while we are watching a TV don’t we notice them ? Lenses (tele) physically narrow down field of vision while human eyes don’t. While you are watching a beautiful bird through your bare eyes and an elephant charges at you silently from a side – you still notice it, now think of seeing the same bird through an 800mm lens while an elepehant slips into the scene from side. The point is mind still receives those information may choose not to react to it while longer teles just cuts off those information..

I was thinking about it since the time you published this post. One observation that my mind when you thought about these is what I want to say here. I remember the first image very well. I completely agree with you about not able to get the exact conditions that we witnessed there, however, when we were looking at the butterfly ( not through the view finder ), our minds were totally oblivious to the background untill we looked through the view finder for composition!

Be it anything, at home when we we are watching a program on television or talking to anyone face to face, we see lots of other things in our drawing room – be it music system, a fan, a table, what ever, but all those will be oblivious when out sight is concentrated on one thing. Don’t you think so? IF yes, then, that’s what we try to render on the film.

How many out of focus images of a tiger do we see when it stalks its prey? I suppose, when we witness the situation as photographers, we change our ‘point’ of view to witness the overall scene in totality.

With such a long comment post, what I intend to convey is that it’s slightly difficult for me to buy the theory where you/shiva say that OOF BG is not the exact scene what we witnessed.

Let me know your thoughts.

What is very interesting to me is we photographers worry lot more about brands of cameras and lenses than artists worry about brands of brushes, canvas and colors. The irony is even manufacturers of cameras/lenses know about this weakness and have built a beautiful business model to push new technologies very fast which will extend such thoughts of us photographers by another decade.

Reading the above text it really feels like lot of things running in your head when you are putting it across into words.

Off late i too have seen in lot of forums that a lot of emphasis is given on close portraits of birds/mammals, background blur(bokeh), compositional rules, exposure etc. But do we want to have few more decades of the following same old “Art of bird photography” ?

Our eyes can detect more tonal ranges than what a camera can – isnt this false representation of the image ? My F2.8 lens gives me a smooth background for a flower which my naked eye cant identify . . . the list goes on and on and on.

Probably these are some of the thoughts which will remain for time to come and with technology progressing so fast it will be tough to show people that there is another world of opportunity waiting to be explored.

Very nicely penned thoughts . . . SK