Thread: Quick question on sight in relation to distance.

I've just run into a small problem that I wanted some feedback on. I've got a character looking down a street at another person. It's night time, but there are some fairly close and bright street lamps on. The other person is walking away, and X distance, where X is enough space for the main character to not be able to determine specific features.

I know there's going to be a lot of flexibility in here, but I didn't want to over or undershoot the mark by an amount that leaves readers thinking I'm an idiot... I have you guys for that

At the moment, I've written down '50 feet away', but I'm worried that this may be too close. As in the character would be able to make out more details than simply the colour of the guys hair and clothing.

Thoughts?

That is very relative, I guess I can only tell you how I see it(no, that was not a pun). Personally I could probably distinguish important features at 100ft. and more general features at 150 so long as the streetlights aren't too dim. On the other hand I have very good eyesight and se pretty well in the dark. Fortunately my vision hasn't been compromised at all, despite 16 years in front of a computer(every day, several hours a day, yay for me). It all depends on your characters vision, and perhaps also his eye for detail.

If your character has 20/20 vision, chances are s/he can make out details at anything up to 100 feet. At night-time, though, our eyes dilate because of the lack of ambient light. Humans actually have pretty good night-vision (at least with practice) but things like street lights tend to destroy our ability to perceive correctly. For example, objects tend to appear closer than they actually are, and when you step from a lit area to a darkened one your pupils dilate so fast that sometimes you see things that aren't there.

But it would be a critical person who would take umbrage with that part of your story. As long as you haven't said in another chapter that the person is blind in one eye and has severe stigmatism in the other, you should be okay.

Thanks for the feedback. I've always struggled with measuring distance by sight (as in determining a number-measurement). Good to know I wasn't too far off track.

Of course, you could always be word-clever, and frame your narrative in such a way that a measurable distance becomes unnecessary, and a comment such as Sam’s an irrelevancy.

This is only going to be a rough example, but will give an idea of what I mean, and can be modified as you see fit: “Character A looked down the street. The lights picked out Character B, close enough to be identified, far enough away that his features were unclear.”

Does he know him? My sight is rubbish at the moment, I couldn't pick out features at more than fifteen feet in clear daylight, people I know well, however, I can pick out by posture and the way they move a hundred feet away.

My advice for questions like this is always: If it is important, do a real life test. Find a street with basically similar night lighting, and send a friend, dressed like your character walking away from you til you get the distance you want. Then measure.

In my work, I use experts for such questions.

It's a fantasy novel, and I've avoided as many 'Earth-concepts' as I can; including distance and time-labels. But I'm assuming that when I write '50 paces', the reader understand this as being somewhere between 50 feet and 50 meters (depending on who's reading). But I hope this looseness helps the reader accept minor discrepancies I don't anticipate. It's actually fairly hard to write a story when you don't have ready names/descriptions for animals, plants, foods, etc. But by the same token, it's allowed me to extend my skills by incorporating these concepts while actively avoiding writing every little detail down. Progressing this into 'he was far enough away to not make out his features' is likely a good solution.

The main character technically knows him, but only by seeing the person briefly (across a room) once before. So he'd not be able to discern who it is by movement/mannerisms, but I appreciate the insight. In fact, I'll be going back to expand on the description of his movement.

I've progressed to the point where the man is moments from dying always exciting.