What is real photography
31st December 2007
An excelent article written by Steve Gascoigne, a fellow Isle of Wight photographer who runs "Available Light Photography"
What is "real" photography? Can it only be film based? If so which format? The birth of photography is usually recognized as happening in 1839. Medium format was introduced in 1901. The first commercial colour process in 1907 - 35mm in 1925. Does this exclude anything non film based from being photography? Are daguerreotypes photography? Or tintypes? Rayographs?
The point I am trying to make is that photography, like anything involving chemistry and physics, is constantly changing & improving.
The word photography comes from the Latin "photo" meaning light and "graph"; to draw so literally means to draw or paint with light. It does not comment on what medium we are to draw on.
So what is real photography then? Devout film users argue that digital photography cannot be real as there is no physical end product - it is all noughts and ones, and that the user can manipulate the image as he see fit, whereas film captures the image as it was at the time.
But this of course shows no knowledge of how images are formed or what can be achieved with film and traditional photographic techniques, or what effects different film brands or printing techniques will have on an image.
No photograph can be a true "real" depiction of the world around us. We see a constantly moving, three dimensional image with our eyes. Our retinas have the most advanced exposure and white balance adjustment system. Our brain has clever siphoning "filters", deleting parts of the image we have no interest in. We do not see at 125th of a second at f8!
© Steve Gascoigne LRPS 2007
To view the full article please visit Available Light Photography
What is "real" photography? Can it only be film based? If so which format? The birth of photography is usually recognized as happening in 1839. Medium format was introduced in 1901. The first commercial colour process in 1907 - 35mm in 1925. Does this exclude anything non film based from being photography? Are daguerreotypes photography? Or tintypes? Rayographs?
The point I am trying to make is that photography, like anything involving chemistry and physics, is constantly changing & improving.
The word photography comes from the Latin "photo" meaning light and "graph"; to draw so literally means to draw or paint with light. It does not comment on what medium we are to draw on.
So what is real photography then? Devout film users argue that digital photography cannot be real as there is no physical end product - it is all noughts and ones, and that the user can manipulate the image as he see fit, whereas film captures the image as it was at the time.
But this of course shows no knowledge of how images are formed or what can be achieved with film and traditional photographic techniques, or what effects different film brands or printing techniques will have on an image.
No photograph can be a true "real" depiction of the world around us. We see a constantly moving, three dimensional image with our eyes. Our retinas have the most advanced exposure and white balance adjustment system. Our brain has clever siphoning "filters", deleting parts of the image we have no interest in. We do not see at 125th of a second at f8!
© Steve Gascoigne LRPS 2007
To view the full article please visit Available Light Photography
