Camera captures light values of a scene at a specific moment in time. While it’s better at that than your eye, that is vastly different from perceiving reality

Camera captures light values of a scene at a specific moment in time. While it’s better at that than your eye, that is vastly different from perceiving reality over time. Which is, incidentally, the only way humans perceive reality. The way you perceive a scene to large extent depends on experiences you have had immediately before that (as well as in all of your prior life), your mood, what the air smells like, whom you are with, and so on. If you sit in a grey room for a long period of time and step into a garden, the colors will jump at you. If you grew up in a small town and stepped onto a rooftop in the middle of a modern megalopolis for the first time, you might initially be stunned by the amount of detail hitting you all at once; if you lived and seen that image every other day for years, you’d be inclined to filter out a lot and focus on what changed. You would not be able to be tricked by your mind into thinking the moon is surprisingly large when it’s near the horizon have you not had the prior experience of seeing the same moon overhead. So on, so forth. Furthermore, the “objective” light values captured by the camera are fairly useless by themselves. We have to trust bundled software, film manufacturers, or indeed our own skills to interpret those raw values in terms of display space, and hopefully produce something resembling what we have experienced in the moment. As an aside, it’s often frustrating how some believe that the output of camera’s JPEG engine at default settings is how reality is. It irks me when someone characterizes a dull[0] photo as “true to life”, and a photo interpreted to make the most use of P3 color space as “edited”, implying that it’s no longer representing reality objectively. There’s no objective representation of a single moment in time and there’s no useful reference point here; both outcomes are “edited”, but perhaps in the latter case the photographer tried to convey how they felt in the moment rather than defer to the view of whoever engineered their film or camera’s JPEG engine. [0] A film or camera engine, while designed by undoubtedly skilled people, is optimized to provide acceptable outcomes for most diverse scenes and doesn’t really know much about final output medium, and as a result the outcomes tend to make a very conservative use of available color space. Addendum: and yes, I do suspect that this aspect of photography has influenced (and not in a way I would characterize as “good”) our perception of reality and how we think about our vision.