Photography Isn’t About What You See, It’s About What You Feel

I recently read a blog post by David duChemin that stopped me mid-scroll, the good kind of stop. You know the one. It made me question a phrase we hear far too often in photography:

“But did it really look like that?”

It’s usually said while staring at a moody landscape, a dramatic portrait, or a carefully lit still life. And every time I hear it, I think the same thing, probably not. But that’s not the point.

And I think David is right, the better question is this: did it really feel like that?

Because photographs don’t record reality. They never have. The moment you lift a camera, you’re interpreting. You choose where to stand, what to exclude, when to press the shutter. A fast shutter freezes moments our eyes can’t truly isolate. A slow shutter stretches time into something dreamy and unfamiliar. Neither is how we “saw” it, but both are valid ways of expressing what the moment meant.

The same goes for aperture. Our eyes don’t blur backgrounds into creamy abstraction, nor do they hold sharp focus from foreground to horizon all at once. Yet we use depth of field constantly to guide attention, to simplify, to suggest intimacy or distance. Light behaves differently to a sensor than it does to our eyes, and lenses show us angles and compressions that simply don’t exist in human vision.

So no, it didn’t really look like that. It never does.

But maybe it felt heavy. Or quiet. Or tense. Or nostalgic. Maybe the landscape felt vast and lonely. Maybe the portrait felt vulnerable. Maybe the still life felt calm, ordered, deliberate. That emotional truth is far more interesting than visual accuracy.

Every photograph is shaped by choices, some made in camera, some made later. All of them are tools, not cheats. They allow us to push and pull an image until it better reflects the experience we had, not just the scene we stood in front of.

Once you let go of the idea that photography must be a literal record, something shifts. You stop asking whether an image is “true to life” and start asking whether it’s true to you. To your memory of that moment. To the feeling that made you want to photograph it in the first place.

And that’s a strangely freeing place to work from.

Because if your photograph is going to make someone feel something anyway, and it always will, then you might as well be intentional about it. Let the image feel the way you felt. Let it say what words couldn’t. Reality can take care of itself.

Just my two cents on the topic…let me know what you think