"Mom, He's Staring at Me!"

"Mom, He's Staring at Me!" 

Pareidolia is a psychological term which means to see something of familiarity in the formation any random set of images, when none actually exists. I am a person who routinely “sees” faces in the photographs I take, and until just recently, did not realize that there was a word to describe this occurrence.

Spock's ears...

I see faces in manzanita burls, rocks, oak trunks, muddy pond floors, clouds and any other place in nature, where the artiste wields a brush with random creativity. Whereas there are times when the faces I see look spooky, as the ones in the dried mud of the pond do, I am never unduly bothered by a sense of being watched. 

The images are what they are and my camera verifies it. Not only that, but there are numerous examples of faces that others have seen, and photographed, some of them quite famous. Wikipedia will give you a wealth of information on this subject, and several of the images were already familiar to me.

I guess it is the fact that I have so many examples from my own travels, that makes me feel so tickled, especially since I had gathered them all up without realizing that I was actually capturing images that fit into a neat category.

When I first got a camera, almost four years ago come Christmas, I was so delighted as to defy description. I am fortunate to live in as varied a locale as there is anywhere in existence, where I can take one hundred photos of the same tree, over the course of a year, and not one will look anything like any of the others.

Photography allows me to see images in a multitude of ways, especially after the pics have been down-loaded onto Suzy Puente, my MacBook. Then they can be cropped and rotated, allowing me to see images in ways they can’t be seen naturally.

I think it would be fun to set up a gallery of the faces I have gathered, but in order to do that, I would have to actually figure out how to access my photos in the first place.

Fairy tales can come true-it can happen to me…