I didn’t notice at first. That’s the thing about gradual change. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly rewrites what normal means.

In 2008 (age 42), I had cataract surgery on my right eye. A Crystalens went in where the natural lens used to be. Later that same year, PRK reshaped my left eye for distance. Two surgeries, two eyes, one year. Then in 2019, orbital decompression to address Graves Eye Disease led to strabismus, which led to corrective surgery for that. Four procedures across more than a decade, each one reasonable in isolation, each one shifting the ground slightly beneath my feet.

What nobody tells you — or what I didn’t hear clearly enough — is that eyes don’t operate independently. The brain holds them together, blends their signals, compensates for the gaps. When you alter both eyes at different times and in different ways, you’re not just changing optics. You’re changing the inputs to a system that’s constantly recalibrating without telling you it’s doing so.

Most of my shooting is digital. I use a Fujifilm X-T3, and it’s where the bulk of my photography happens — the everyday work, the considered shots, the ongoing practice. Over time, I noticed I was leaning more heavily on autofocus. Letting the camera confirm what I wasn’t quite sure of myself. I didn’t examine that shift closely. The camera was capable, the results were reliable, and reaching for autofocus felt like a reasonable use of good technology.

I also shot film, less often but deliberately. At some point I went through a period of reacquisition — old manual SLRs, glass with history. A Pentax Spotmatic II. A Pentax P3n. A Minolta X-700. And the one that became the centre of it: a Minolta XD-11.

I gathered lenses with care alongside the bodies — a Minolta MD Rokkor-X 45mm f/2, a 50mm f/1.7, a 28mm f/2.8. My father’s Asahi SMC Takumar 50mm f/1.4 and 55mm f/2. A Super-Multi-Coated Takumar 28mm f/3.5. Each one chosen deliberately. Each one kept for a reason.

The XD-11 in particular felt right — balanced, precise, mechanical in a way that put me in direct contact with the act of making a photograph. I gave away or sold other bodies over time. The lenses I kept. The XD-11 stayed.

Somewhere around 2024 I noticed that manual focus felt less decisive on both fronts. On the X-T3, I was second-guessing focus confirmation more than I used to. Reviewing files, I’d find myself unsure of edges that should have been clear. With the film bodies, the split-prism wasn’t giving me the snap of certainty I expected. I blamed technique. I blamed fatigue. I blamed age and shaky hands.

What I didn’t consider, not once, was that my eyes had changed.

The compensation happened in parallel. On the digital side, I leaned further into autofocus, trusted the X-T3’s systems where I used to trust my own judgment. On the film side, I acquired a Nikon N2020 with an AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 — autofocus in a film body, specifically so the SLR results would be more consistent.

The N2020 was heavier than the XD-11, less elegant, less immediate. But it delivered. At the time I called it preference. A different tool for a different mood.

At my most recent eye exam, in February, I mentioned that certain objects looked slightly more blue through my right eye than my left. My ophthalmologist brought out the Ishihara plates — those circles of coloured dots with numbers hidden inside. Reading them with my left eye, easy. With my right eye, some of the numbers simply weren’t there.

The diagnosis that followed made things concrete. Posterior capsule opacification behind the intraocular lens in my right eye — which explains the contrast loss, the softening of edges, the weakening of the focus cues I rely on. A YAG laser capsulotomy is scheduled for late April. That’s fixable.

What isn’t fixable is the optic nerve damage in the same eye. The colour sensitivity loss is permanent. And the peripheral diplopia from the strabismus surgery — double vision at the extreme edges of gaze — persists too. I stay in the stable centre. I move my head rather than my eyes. I’ve adapted.

But adaptation isn’t the same as awareness.

Manual focus is a confidence game as much as a mechanical one. It depends on micro-contrast, on edge definition, on trusting that what looks sharp is sharp. When contrast fades in one eye, colour symmetry shifts between them, and peripheral alignment is imperfect, certainty erodes. Not all at once. Quietly. The system still functions. But the feedback is no longer quite the same feedback it used to give.

I wasn’t failing at manual focus. I was operating in a visual system that had changed without my knowledge, relying on cues that had quietly degraded. No single change was dramatic. All of them together moved the floor.

The capsulotomy in April may restore some contrast. It won’t restore the colour sensitivity. It won’t fix the peripheral alignment. Some of this is simply permanent, and I’m learning to hold that without either catastrophising it or minimising it.

What stays with me is the sequence: behaviour changed first, understanding came later. I leaned on autofocus before I knew why I needed to. I changed how I worked before I could explain it. The visual system adapted quietly, and the conscious mind followed with reasons.

I still see. I still make photographs. But I’m no longer assuming that what I see is fixed, stable, or obvious. Perception turns out to be a negotiation — between biology and brain, between what’s there and what gets through, between confidence and doubt.

I notice that now. And I’m less inclined to take it for granted.