A new study by Linda Henkel at Fairfield College has found that taking pictures of events causes people to remember that event less well.  The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, found that taking photos of a thing or event, at least taking somewhat generic, "whole scene" photos, tends to impair your memory of that thing or event. 

The results are actually a bit more complex than reported in the mass media, where most writers have latched onto the idea that "taking pictures of an event makes you less likely to remember it."  In fact, the study, which was done on a museum tour, said that if you take photos of each object as a whole, you remember fewer objects, less details about things near the objects, and less about where they were in the museum than if you took no photos at all.  However, if participants zoomed in on a particular detail of an object, they both remembered that object better, remembered more about details of unrelated/nearby things they did not specifically zoom in on, and remembered more stuff overall.

Zooming in on details

So, the rowing connection: when photographing rowing, and especially when photographing big races as they charge to the finish line, the experience of watching a race with your own eyes compared to that of watching a race through a giant telephoto or zoom lens could not be more different.  The former experience is all about general impressions, a sense of the race as it unfolds, and the overall environment, excitement, intensity, and more in very satisfying ways.  The latter experience of watching intently through a lens can be incredibly narrow, but as a result intensely heightened as well, and very satisfying in a different way.

Add to that a photographer's credo that "if you saw it through the lens, you did not get the picture" – which derives from the fact that during the moment of photo capture, the mirror flips up and the viewfinder goes black while the image is written to the sensor (or film) – and the experience of watching a rowing race through a big telephoto lens is really different from the norm.   You see some things happen in sometimes excruciating detail (especially toward the end of a 2k race in a grueling sport like rowing), and others you just somehow absorb – much like the people who zoomed in during their museum tours and somehow noticed a lot more things on which they had not zoomed in.

Further, especially when shooting across the finish line, there can be a truly chaotic mass of bodies competing for your lens space (and your camera's autofocus), and as you work to sort all that out to get the photos of the crews and events that you really want to capture, things get pretty wild.

For many photographers, their sense of what actually went on in any given regatta or race does not come together until they download all their photos and are able to fill in the gaps in their experience of the event.  That's why, for rowing photographers who really care about the racing, the moment of downloading all the photos can be an electrifying experience, as it can be the first time you actually "see" the whole race as it happened.

Check out the photos above, from the final of the women's quad at the 2012 Olympics  – one is a "photo of an event as a whole," the other a tight zoom on a specific detail from that event.  Which do you think sticks with you more, and is more indelibly written in your memory banks?  Seems like an easy one to answer.