Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/05/13
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]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 - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html