The beginning of photography surprisingly descends from drawing, as a result of artists projecting a scene onto a canvas using what we now call a pinhole camera, of course though without the photo paper. This occurs in a box when a small hole allows in light, resulting in the image that the light is being reflected from, displayed in a mirrored orientation on the opposite side of the box. This could be arranged in a way to allow for a canvas to be placed in front of the inside wall of the box where the image was being displayed, and the artist tracing the light onto the canvas. The way that this evolved into a pinhole camera (of which I made one in my high school photo class) was by the invention of light-sensitive paper, or more commonly known as photo-paper or film, and replacing the artist’s canvas with a photographer’s photo-paper. The photo-paper would then react with the light, an analogue process, creating the photograph on the paper. This results in what are known in photography as negatives, which are the first version of analogue photos and typically only used to then create positives, which are the final products of film that everyone knows, due to the positives having the correct orientation and coloration to real life, whereas the negatives are flipped and have switched lights and darks. But the reason that film photography is an analogue process first can be explained by light being analogue. Although we have technology to measure light intensity and frequencies, light as a visual means of transmitting information is analogue due to the ambiguous way in which humans interpret it. One example from a class session was regarding the classroom light dimmers on the light switch, and how it would be impossible for someone to make two rooms the exact same brightness based on their vision alone, and not measuring the dimmers’ position. Film photography is also analogue because it is a direct product of light intensity, as the way that an image appears on photo-paper is from the paper containing silver-halide crystals, which are light sensitive crystals that change into a more metallic silver when hit by light. Because light intensity is an analogue transfer of information, the crystals on photo-paper will reflect that by how much they are changed to silver or how much they stay their original color. This allows for gradients of light to be captured on film, and in photos where low light is present, the analogue nature of film photography can be clearly visible, unlike the image itself, when it is hard to distinguish where one object ends and the next begins. The ability to determine a concrete point in a low-quality analogue image of where something ends and the next begins brings photography into its digital format. Digital photos take the form of digital information after they are converted from a digital camera taking in (analogue) light to their digital representations of that light’s intensity. To keep this simple and in the timeline of photography history, this example will only discuss the original black-and-white digital cameras. Once this analogue light information is transferred into a digital form, the camera is able to assign each area on the screen, designated to pixels, a color, on a scale of white to black. Each pixel can only contain one color, resulting in the image being a digital representation of a real life analogue image. Similar to how the changing or lack of changing of silver halide crystals on film can result in grainy photos, the limitation of pixels only containing one color, and that color only having so many possibilities within the digital information translation, digital images can have a lower quality. This happens multiple ways, the most common of which being low light digital photos, where the light intensity was not enough for the camera to recognize a significant difference of light in an area, causing the analogue-to-digital converter to assign the closest color it can to that particular pixel, ending in the production of a pixelated or blurry digital image.
Some advantages of film photography include the more fluid gradient of light that is able to appear in an image compared to the strict one-color-per-pixel format that digital images have. With digital photography, in order to make a seemingly seamless light gradient, more and more pixels, and therefore, more and more information is required, reducing the number of photos a camera is able to store at once.
One aspect of the limitations of both film and original digital photography is how they cannot be enlarged without losing quality. Due to the need of film photography containing more silver halide crystals to replicate a larger image with the same quality, and the need of more pixels for digital photography to replicate a larger image, neither of these formats can be enlarged without becoming more grainy, or more pixelated, as information, in the form of crystals or pixels, cannot be added without retaking the original image onto the paper or into the camera.Â
Learning Objective:
- Formulate and defend a position on the benefits and liabilities associated with an object, concept, or process that has become digital, relative to its pre-digital existenceÂ