Which eye, what hand?

I got dizzy ‘cos it just kept changing between the two for no apparent reason!

i use either eye and regularly switch between them.

My grandfather (Dr. Vearl McBride) did a great deal of study as a professor regarding this subject back in the 60’s and 70’s in relation to speed reading. He found (as did other’s of course) that there was a huge correlation in hand-eye coordination and left and right brain functions.

As a kid I was subjected to wearing an eye patch to “correct” my being uncoordinated (left-eyed, right handed and footed). It of course sucked. Imagine going to school as a 13 year old for a month wearing a pirate-patch. My ego still bears the scars, and any pirate movie sends me into hysterics…

Anyway. Back to the point, I suck at math. Always have, but during the time I was wearing that damn patch my math skills improved incredibly. I aced just about every math test for the exact time I was Captain Hook. Not exactly perfect science, but it was enough to convince me.

I didn’t wear the patch long enough to fully correct the “problem.” The beatings from other children became far too frequent to justify the continued usage. However, this was before I had heard of Leica’s.

My MP has been begging me to bring out the old patch. It obviously makes a difference. Maybe some day I’ll be able to use the viewfinder as God intended.

I find that dizzying, but may try to cultivate it as an experiment, lord knows it feels different than using just one eye or even from shooting from the hip, as the eyes are doing distinct tasks this way.

Normally with 35, r hand, r eye, left hand reaches over the top to block light coming in at the eye, a trademarked move which MEM herself was quite taken with when once she witnessed it in action.

I had an Hexar AF once upon a time with the finder at extreme left. Now I shoot exclusively with a D200 and manual primes. I always have both eyes open. It’s as much about security as anything else though. When you shoot on the streets as much as I do, or did rather, what you actually need are eyes at the back of your head, you know?

Given that we humans have stereo vision for judging distance, like most mammalian predators, using both eyes while also looking through a camera viewfinder plays havoc on the brain as it interrupts that process. However, I find that I can process information from both eyes independently most of the time but I have to be fresh and full of energy to do so. If I’m tired I just can’t do it and often times I won’t be seeing pictures anyway.

Anyone else? In fact, I can steer my eyes in different directions simultaneously. I do it to get laughs from the kids sometimes. It’s exhausting though. If we ever bump into each other over a pint you can ask me to do it but I might spill my drink or fall over.

http://photohumorist.blogspot.com

According to the web site test, I’m like Lisa…it first went counter clockwise…then I looked away a moment and it reversed. Then I found I could reverse it at will, but that it also sometimes reversed on it’s own.

Seeing the number of folks who use their left eye is somewhat comforting – I have recently been wondering if I should force myself to use the right eye, but when I do it’s difficult, I have problems just lining up my eye so I can see the whole frame, and then it’s really uncomfortable.

I guess by the tick tock of a clock it’s a short period of time. But time is relative. For me, when the camera is at my eye it can seem like an eternity as people and their shadows, birds, traffic and what not, slow to a crawl. It’s during moments like this that I think I briefly go deaf as my brain appears to draw energy from other faculties and aims it at my vocal processing allowing just enough in reserve for my muscles to physically hold my posture. I’m also momentarily rendered mute during these intense situations. If someone touches me then everything instantly speeds up and I snap out of it losing that edge of control. I’ll also be uncontrollably furious many times as if mood management becomes disabled briefly. It’s quite an intoxicating experience in fact.

The way Michael Shumacher waltzed his Ferari on a rain soaked race track faster than anyone else always fascinated me. He was at one with his machine. Right on the edge.

How Rodger Federer seemed to almost create time to position himself to make, what would otherwise be, an impossible cross court winner. How did these guys make it seem so easy?

I spend a lot of time thinking about this. This acute concentration that seems to slow the world down.

I once was told during a lifeguard training session that by the laws of averages one of us in the class would one day have to perform a rescue in difficult circumstances and most likely not while on duty. This frightened me somewhat. It turns out that in 1991 I was in such a situation in the small hours of a frigid winter night when I decided to jump into a river and pull out a young woman who had changed her mind having attempted to take her own life. She ended up in the hospital for three weeks very ill as a result of acute hypothermia. I too had some difficulties as a result but they were short lived only lasting a couple of hours when I actually lost my mind.

Everything seemed to last so long during the rescue but onlookers said it was all over very quickly. Ever since I’ve been almost obsessed with this perception of slowed down time. Like when you know a drink is about to fall from a table but you’re frozen and unable to catch it. Much of the time I’ll catch it. For me it’s “being in the zone”.

I’m left eye dominant but shoot using my right. I’m also quite ambidextrous.

I think in some cases it’s not just concentration, but also a combination of inherent ability and practice (the sports examples, and seeing/catching things quickly). But those instances where time just slows down (your rescue example), I think it’s an amazing ability where we instantly ramp our brains and reactions up into hyperdrive. I have an eexperience similar to yours, where I was almost in a head-on collision when a driver crossed the center line…it was over in 2 or 3 seconds (if that long), but seemed like ten times that. I can still remember every single detail.

Amazing things, our brains. makes me wonder how much untapped potential is really in there, for all of us.

eye: left (im blind in my right eye)

almost never “compose” or “frame” anymore….grew weary of that and looking through the frame (which i do, occasionally now, when im feeling “frightened”)..

b

The 30D just doesn’t feel right when I use my right eye for soem reason.

i tried to use my right eye but it hurts my neck, it seems possible to switch but not comfortable.

the spinning lady does not dictate what your hand dominance is, that is to say your brain sidedness (if it is real at all) does not have to correlate with handedness.

preston, sure you see a scene and decide to take a photo before looking through the camera but i often find that once i do look through the camera i may want to change how i am looking at it or not want to take the photo at all. though i agree i sometimes shoot from the hip, i suppose i do the framing in my minds eye in those cases.

paul, know what you mean with the slow down. i think it just has to do with concentration, like you say being in the zone. where you can do whatever your work is and not think about anything else, not think about time or your surroundings. where an hour can be a minute or vice versa. i get the feelings quite often.

Another thing I’ve noticed with my two children, particularly my youngest, is how he uses his strength. Adults pick things up using their arm and back muscles, primarily. But little boys, certainly my little Connor, doesn’t. Rather he seems to gather the required energy from his entire body to pick things up. He uses all of his muscles from everywhere to perform simple things. This morning he picked up a heavy box of train tracks in his bedroom to bring into the living room so that he could build a new track. He’s only three years old and I’d have thought the box too heavy for him. He’s tall but not overly big for his age and yet he performed the task flawlessly which astonished both my wife and me.

Might there be something to this, I wonder? It’s how I operate. Since that rescue incident when, most likely, only adrenalin must have been pumping through my veins, I managed to drag this woman, who was about my size and wearing a heavy coat, out of the water and lifted her over a fence. I still wonder about how I managed to do it while the water was only 3 degrees Celsius (my father measured it the next morning). Since then, I’ve thought of physical tasks as requiring energy rather than strength. Perhaps these are one and the same anyway. Notice how some boxers seem to use their entire bodies like coiled springs rather than just big strong arms? Tiger Woods is good at coiling like a spring. He seems to be able to hit a golf ball further than anyone else and he’s not the biggest guy on the course.

We can learn from watching children. They just go at life with such gusto and with their entire minds and bodies free. Something to think about. Mind, matter and energy are so closely linked. Life is a force. A very formidable force. It’s astonishing to me that that force of life can, to a certain extent, overcome time. Overpower time. Well weird. But true.

Left eyed. I find it impossible to focus with the other one. I’ve tried on many occasions to take a ‘cool-looking’ self-portrait of myself in the mirror where I hold up the camera to my right eye, focus and take a photo with at least half my face showing (since when you are left-eyed the camera is in your face) but I’ve never managed to focus or compose. So for all intensive purposes I too like Bob have a blind right eye, which I guess is only useful to some extent in judging distance.

I once injured my right hand during a stupid fireworks experiment and had a big bulky cast on it for a couple of weeks as all five fingers had at least one bone cracked or broken and I thus had to learn how to operate my manual nikon using only my left hand. At first it was almost impossible to hold it with my left hand in a way where I would also use my left hand to engage the shutter, but after some practice I developed a neat grip and although it looked funny I was able to carry on understanding the world trough my lens.

As part of my course at university I had a neuroscience class where they thought us about how contemporary science sees the brain to be exceptionally flexible – meaning that the old idea that certain parts of the brain are used for certain things is no longer excepted. We now know that certain parts of the brain are usually used for certain tasks, but can be easily reprogrammed to perform others with astonishing precision. They taught us many cool experiments, but the one that stuck with me was the one where a professor took a bunch of clumsy people that had very bad spacial perception and could not feel any differences in Braille writing using their fingers and blind folded them. After something like 10 days they all had phenomenal spacial perception, could distinguish between different symbols in Braille and their audio perception became much more refined. After their blindfolds were take off they had problems with visual coordination and as that slowly returned they lost spacial orientations and digital sensory discrimination. There are many other really cool experiments on how we perceive images and sounds and how we can alter our brains to perceive these stimuli differently.

right handed, right eyed.
handle my hockey stick left handed though.

I always look both ways when crossing the street…

(That said, I wonder if I should them look at the resulting photos with one eye closed…)

Though since you mention, I want to try out altering my habits and see if it affects how I compose the final frame – since most of the composition is done when the camera is still dangling by the shoulder.

John

So for me; Right hand – Left eye.