photography

Thinking in pictures

One of the strange things of discovering that you have autism is that you get to meet a lot of experts who tell you that you have all kind of problems you never knew you had. Among other I’ve been told that I’ve problems concentrating. When I’m doing something it could very well happen that the softest of sounds would disturb me.
This is strange because it’s not really a problem I’ve been experiencing. On the contrary. People have been telling me for years that I should pay more attention to what happens around me. When I’m doing something I seem to shut out the rest of the world and a war could break out without me noticing it.

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An other problem I’m supposed to have is a problem with seeing the generality. Apparently people with autism are very good at noticing details but they tend to miss the big picture.
This was also a problem were I at first thought that the experts were wrong. I’ve always had the feeling that I’m as good as seeing the big picture as anyone. But after trying to draw the picture in my mind I’ve found that my ideas about how I see the world were completely off.
I’m finding that I don’t see one world. I see something of a collection of little picture that are patched together to form a big picture of the world.
Only thing is that the collection isn’t complete. Of some parts of the world I’ve have hundreds of pictures in my mind and other parts are completely blank.

How to discribe this

I’ve actually read about this phenomenon before I knew that I had autism and I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t imagine the kind of vision of the world people who think in picture would have. Now I’ve found that I’m one of those people who think in pictures I’m starting to understand why description I’ve read where so incomprehensible. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time but I too have found that there is no good way to explain the way I see the world.

To really explain it you should make some kind of movie. But since nobody understands what it is we’re talking about nobody will ever make that movie.
Or will they…
It turns out that Microsoft has been working on a program, Photosynth, that is used to link large amounts of pictures. The program looks for details in the pictures. By linking pictures at overlapping details you get a kind of movie of a building or landscape.

My world

Microsoft has a working demo (IE only) were you can see a building composed of hundreds of pictures.
As you move around this building you’ll get to see the world as I see it.

• Lots of pictures.
• Perspective changes from picture to pictures.
• There are hardly any pictures that give you an over view.
• There are a lot of pictures with details of the building.
• You get a real live feeling of the geometry the building.

Color fountain

Color fountain 1st sketch

This is horrible.
I don’t understand why there is so much brown in this drawing. This was not what I had in mind.
I’ll have to try to make this drawing some other way.

Link

Do you like elephants? At this site you’ll find drawings of elephants and other zoo animals.

To my regular readers

I’m running into the problem that I can’t maintain a frequence of 5 drawings a week. I’m slowly getting to the point were I want to do more complicated projects and it is very hard to do those if you’re struggling to meet a deadline. To give myself a little breathing room I’ve build a little stock of drawings.
I can produce about three drawings in a week so I’ve dropped the posts frequence.
(I’ve just finished a very nice drawing called “Who’s afraid of yellow, red (and blue)” that you’ll get to see in one and a half week.)

Thinking in pictures One of the strange things of discovering that you have autism is that you get to meet a lot of experts who tell you that you have...

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