A couple of days ago I was walking down a trail to one of my favorite fishing spots in all of Maine. Along the trail I saw a bunch of moose tracks. I did my best to get a good picture of them. Unfortunately, like all pictures of moose tracks that I’ve taken over the years, the pictures I took didn’t capture the size and detail of the tracks as I well as I would have liked. That frustration reminded me of a TED-Ed lesson that explains why our eyes see things differently than our cameras capture them.
Eye vs. Camera is a fascinating TED-Ed lesson. In the lesson we learn why our eyes don’t always see things the same way that they’re captured with a camera. Through the lesson we learn how our eyes perceive and focus on colors compared to a camera. We also learn fun facts like why we can’t watch our own eyes shift from side to side in a mirror. The full lesson can be seen here. The video is embedded below.
TED-Ed offers some resources to extend the lesson. Optical Illusions and Phenomena will show students more examples of how eyes perceive light and color differently than is captured by a camera.
