Robert Qvist – Photographer and Visually Impaired
Hi folks! Since this is my personal blog I figured I’d do a crazy thing here: I’m gonna be much more personal than I usually am
All right, some of you guys out there already know this, but some of you don’t so here we go!
I’m visually impaired, I have both Cataract and Aniridia since birth. A short description of this is that
Cataract makes the lenses in my eyes foggy, so they’re more grayish than black and it’s very difficult for me to see details, objects and peoples faces from more than… say 20-25 ft (~5-7m). I’m not allowed to drive a car but that’s not really a big problem for the since I have a bike, two feet and a bus station just outside my apartment door 😉 When I surf the web and read stuff on facebook on my cellphone I always have to zoom in on the screen. Thank God for smartphones and the magnification tool on Windows!
Aniridia is the absence of the iris. So when you look into my eyes, the only thing you’ll see are my pupils. Now, I’ve got a lot of comments from people saying that my eyes look cool and that they are beautiful etc so I guess it’s not really a big problem for me 😉 haha. I guess that they look kinda brownish if you don’t look too close 🙂
At the moment my vision is about 10% on both eyes which may sound like pretty much nothin’, and in a way, I guess it is. Glasses don’t work, unless it’s reader glasses which I use from time to time, and contacts aren’t an option since they don’t do much either.. As I said I can’t drive a car and if you stand on the opposite side on a road from me I won’t probably be able to see that it actually is you, but I’m very good at remembering voices and I have basically memorized all my friends’ clothes so I can’t say that I suffer from it in my everyday life all that much. Books, news papers, cell phones, computer screens… that’s the hard part!
I work in a camera store in Trollhättan (Sweden) and really the only problem I’ve got there is the price tags that has a ridiculously small text! Other than that, I love my job where I get to meet new peaople every day!
But how about the photography part?
Well, I thank God every day for auto focus! When I shoot I could ask for a little bit more magnification in the viewfinder but other than that I’m golden as long as the camera/lens has a fast and accurate auto focus. I trust my camera to do a good job! On the post processing side of things I’m very picky with my photos and I often zoom in to 100-200% to really look at the overall sharpness in the photo. This of course is very time consuming but I’ll get the job done! I’ll post what I think is sharp and sometimes I might even over sharpen it a bit just to be sure that I don’t get the comment “blurry pic… n00b” and so on 😉 haha
But seriously, I love photography and it is what I some day want to do all day long, 365 days a year! I want to start my own company and make a living off of my photography because I can’t imagine myself doing anything else!
How about surgery?
I’ve already done one cataracts surgery. When I went in the 6th grade I did a surgery in Gothenburg on my right eye and I went from around 2% to 13% eyesight. That felt AWESOME! Suddenly I could see things that I had not been able to see for years! My left eye wasn’t that bad so they decided to wait until I felt the need to do it again. I think that that moment is near now, the vision on my left eye is getting pretty blurry so I really want to do another surgery.
When? Only time will tell…
This is not a sympathy blog post, I just like sharing my thoughts and my life story. Please give me som comments about what you think. Do you have the same problem? Do you know anyone who has? Do you wanna know someting that I forgot to write? Please, comment here or sent me an email! 🙂