Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/05/13

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Subject: RE: [Leica] Re: Photoshop dilemma
From: Adam Bridge <abridge@idea-processing.com>
Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 14:35:49 -0700

On 5/13/02 Tim Atherton  wrote:

>
>What's the one-for-one Adam? It certainly isn't scale... very few
>photographs are very realstic in that sense at all...? Just one obvious
>aspect of the unreality of photographs
>

I guess I was thinking of it in terms of the negative and the print. If I can
apply some function that transforms the negative into what is on the print then
I think the print is a photograph.

For example you can process the color film in odd chemistry to get wierd
effects. But there's still a one for one relationship between the light that
struck the negative and what's there. I may be "on acid" or something but that
relationship is still there. I can then take that negative and put it into an
imaginary enlarger and work various processing while making the print. Still a
photograph.

But I'd suggest that if I alter the negative mechanically, or the print
mechanically, then what is left is no longer a photograph.

So in photoshop there are things I can do to the original digital image - a
series of mathematical operations. I'd suggest that if those operations are
functions: one value in, one value out then the final thing that is produced is
a photograph because there is a one for one relationship. I can change the
geometry, the topology if you like, but I haven't added anything else to the
image beyond the math. 

I guess that's what I'm suggesting.

That gives a pretty broad reading into what a photograph might be - but it
preserves a connection between the light, the lens, the recording medium, and
the final print.

As I write this I can see that my definition might be over-broad, but I think
it's a place to start.

For example: the false-color images produced by the Hubble seem to be
photographs to me, even though they are representations of light which is
greater than the visible spectrum. Radio-telescopes produce imagery. I think of
those as photographs even though they are in radio waves. Or gamma or x-rays for
that matter. They get filtered by some function to make visible light.

Okay - treading on the extremes here but it's at boundary conditions that we
learn how things really work.

Adam
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