Most of us take the world at face value. We see, hear, taste, smell, touch (plus lots of other senses). The astonishing truth is that we can only perceive a tiny fraction of the physical universe. Take the electromagnetic spectrum, for instance. We usually see a chart where it’s all smushed together. That makes the fraction that we can see to be on the order of something like 10-20%. It’s far, far less, coming it at around 0.0035%. So, if you had a thousand dollars, 3.50 of that would be visible light.
The point to all of this is that we can take things for granted. Take the time to look a little closer at things because our perception is already so limited. Make the most of it and see if you can find a bit more in something that appears to be rather mundane. This happened to me the other day while looking at a table we recently put in the garage. I’m using it as a table to shoot photos of products or things to sell on eBay. While changing my camera settings I snapped a pic that caught my attention. I noticed that the light reflected in a very interesting way. It’s hard to describe so it’s best to show it.
So, I took the raw photo into Photoshop and my first thought was that it looked like it was radiating light. So, I went into Camera Raw and started pushing and pulling and it started to materialize into what I had envisioned. After some blur, duplication, and other effects, I ended up with something that I liked. To me, it looked sort of like an artists depiction (this artist, to be exact!) of an exploding star.
Here’s the best part. The table top is stainless steel. Iron is used to make steel. Iron is the final element a star fuses before exploding into a supernova (a Type II Supernova, in this case). If stars never died, we’d never have been born. To me, in a way, this is art imitating life and death.
Keep your senses about you because you never know when you might be able to see or hear something in a different way.