Location Taken: Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: April 2008
I’ve mentioned Garfield Park Conservatory before, and even shown a different picture from the succulents room, so I don’t have too much else I can say about this one on those subjects.
I do enjoy how these cactus spikes lack any surrounding context and thus aren’t as fixed in scale as most pictures. These could be ten feet tall for all you know!
Ok, more like ten centimeters, and the focal lengths involved do give it away a bit.
When you’re dealing with distant subjects (like these would have to be to have that many in one photo AND be ten feet tall), everything ends up in the same focal range. Close-up, and only a few do. It’s an exponential thing, with the furthest focal lengths covering billions of light-years (looked up at the night sky lately?), with the closest dividing down into the millimeter range. And, if our eyes could physically manage it, there’s no limit to how narrow it can get. It’d be a bit odd to be able to focus down onto a single atom, though, and would require some truly impressive blinkers in your head. And really, it’s not worth it for general life.
Still, the focal range does give you clues to the depth of a picture, despite it being a two-dimensional image. It’s also why it’s possible to walk around fairly easily with only one eye, though driving’s not too recommended just because judging distance with focal length takes a bit more time. Our human bodies have a lot of back-ups and redundancies for critical features, which is why we manage just fine in a dangerous world.
