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| Engineered Images? [message #705 is a reply to message #101 ] |
Fri, 29 April 2005 18:24   |
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07:05am Aug 30, 2002
Dear Pedro,
First, I hope your recovery from "The Fall" has gone well and that if you are not back to 100% yet, I hope you will be soon.
Your editorial is, as always, insightful and I am hard pressed to find any arguments to the contrary. It makes total sense, at least in the digital world, to work in color. I also agree that there will be more and more b&w-to-color converts as time and technology march forward. However, for the sake of discussion, I would like to pose a question or two that do not necessarily reflect how I feel about the matter. They are more of the "wondering" type of questions.
Let me first set the stage for my questions. Digital technology and the tools we use to work with this technology depend heavily on talented computer programmers who may or may not be artists and/or photographers. I would assume that the programmers at least work hand-in-hand with the artists to develop these new wonderful tools we all have at our disposal. Included among the various tools are the "filters" you speak of in your editorial. Although there are an almost infinite number of combinations and permutations by which we can adjust and tweak our images, it seems to me that there is a possibility that the final images might have an inherent "engineered" look and feel to them that might reflect the style or even the personalities of the programmers that develop these tools. In your example of the NIK b&w filter, I imagine that a team of programmers have made decisions regarding the algorithms and rules to translate color into shades of gray. I also imagine that there is certainly more than one way to skin a cat and it seems to me that their style of programming must somehow enter the picture (no pun intended).
So I pose these questions:
Is it possible that a handful of programmers working diligently on these tools can be influencing the look and feel of literally millions if not billions of images? Or better said, can it be that almost every image manipulated with certain filters will carry a "signature" of the programmer's personality that developed the filters?
I'm not saying that this would necessarily be a good or bad thing, but perhaps it is something that should be explored or examined as we continue this inevitable transformation into digital photography.
As always, thank you Pedro for ZZ and your thoughtful commentary.
Peter Singhofen
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| Some thoughts on engineers and art [message #706 is a reply to message #101 ] |
Fri, 29 April 2005 18:25 |
 Pedro Meyer
Messages: 202
Registered: March 2005 |
Senior Member |
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10:03pm Sep 2, 2002
Peter,
You always contribute such challenging thoughts, which I am sure are on the minds of a good number of other fine colleagues.
Here is how I see this issue.
It is the task for the artists, and has been through out the ages, to bend the tools available to render fine art with them. I am sure much the same argument you raise could be made for music, for instance. Nothing to say of film making. The tools available have always been intimately connected to what the tool makers could deliver. Of course photography has been essentially a direct connection between technology and art, which is why at first it was considered irrelevant and incapable of delivering art.
Now we know that this was never the case, fine art was always possible using cameras and darkroom gear. The same will of course happen with digital photography and it's technology. The same as with music and film making.
Publisher of ZoneZero
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| Re: Engineered Images? [message #707 is a reply to message #101 ] |
Fri, 29 April 2005 18:26 |
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11:04pm Jan 2, 2003
Peter,
I think you are right that the programmers who develop digital software do affect the look of images produced with them. But only up to a point.
The same is true of the chemists who create film emulsions (how many times have you looked at an image and said 'Velvia'?). Also the lens designers (the lovely out of focus areas produced by certain Leica lenses), etc.
The issue is that everything that is engineered will have limitations or characteristics which, if you are knowledgeable enough, can identify the technology used. To focus on the specifics you talked of, I find this is especially noticeable in images that have had 'one filter' tricks applied to them. However the real issue with such images is that the creator has simply resorted to a trick rather than sculpting or crafting the image. Really good work transcends the tools used to create them, by reflecting the vision of the artist rather than the limitations of the tools. When such an artist manipulates the image they do manipulations of such complexity and/or subtlety the tools become invisible.
At least that is what we should all aspire to.
Cheers,
Wayne
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Color vs Black and White
