A recent post raised some interesting thoughts about our reliance on visual clues to help make sense of the scale and context of a photograph. I’ve posted two images here that were photographed from the same position and at the same time. The first image, posted recently (click here for that post), resulted in some interesting insights into our reliance on visual clues to help us make sense of ‘abstract’ images. For example, some people didn’t register it was a photograph of the sea, others misinterpreted the scale thinking the photo was a close-up, perhaps taken by someone standing in the sea. I thought it would be interesting therefore to re-post the original photo alongside another from the same location. Including the lifeboat in the photo provides extra visual clues to help clarify the subject, context and size of the image but in doing so it loses the sense of ‘abstraction’/visual uncertainty I tried to create in the first photo.