One of the most common mistakes beginning artists make is attempting to recreate exactly what appears in their reference photos—everything in sharp focus, everything in detail—but this is not the way the eye actually sees a given scene. The eyes have only a narrow range of sharp visual perception, and the camera does not capture an image in the same way that the eye sees it. In images captured by a camera, everything is in equal focus and all edges are well defined because all the light sensors are equally dispersed in the camera chip. So if an artist copies that photo exactly, the painting will seem “off” to viewers.
To illustrate this, imagine you are playing a game of pool. When focusing on the white cue ball several feet away from you, your eye will bring only that specific ball into sharp focus. All the surrounding balls, even the ones that are actually closer to you will appear to become blurred round objects with undefined edges. This is an important concept to keep in mind with your paintings.
A digital camera has millions of pixels. This picture shows the way they appear evenly spaced. Each pixel works like a sensor cell in our eyes, but in this case the cells don’t become more dispersed towards the outer regions of the eye. That’s why everything in a photo is in sharp focus, but with the human eye it is not.