The colors of reality
Sep. 12th, 2012 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumAesthetics are strange things.
Take photography. It’s changed a lot in the 30 years or so since I first started being serious with a camera. Even in the 27 years, or so, since I got into the nuts and bolts of the making of pictures it’s changed, a lot. When I started I was looking at film stocks, and grain, and how to manipulate them; when I couldn’t see them (did I push the film, and use a fine-grain developer; at a lower temp, or was I going to shoot it straight, but rush the time in the soup by increasing the temperature, etc.).
But the “look” was limited by the film, and the paper. Color prints had a wider range than slides. Slide film set the standards for “good” color, because magazines used “chromes” to illustrate. That meant five stops of range. That was often narrowed some, because saturation increased if you underexposed some, but at the cost of compressing the spectrum from black to white.
Digital has range closer to that wider range of color print. And in the past 10 years or so that color palette (as well as things like stacking several exposure to create “High Dynamic Range) has expanded. Along come plug-ins for editing software, and apps like instagram, to make it possible to recreate the lost look of days of yore.
Then, because some people think those are overdone, there is an apps to remove the instagram sort of effect. Normalise says it restores pictures which have been, “overdone” back to the way they were. Which is well and good, but the folks at Buzzfeed went and applied the app to scans of actual photos from the ‘60s.
Which is fine, but what got me was this sentence, And it follows that, since Instagram's filters are based in on an aesthetic defined by actual old camera hardware and film, it should work near as well on real old photographs. It kind of does! Here's Andy Warhol sneezing, for example:
Which they followed with some other photos and then this, But this old (Kodachrome?) portrait of John Lennon looks a bit more real.
Real? Not to my eye. The originals look as I recall such photos looking. I actually found the Lennon shot to be much more fake looking. Not that it doesn’t look like Lennon, but rather that it looks like Lennon if you took his picture with a cheap digital camera.
But cheap digital cameras have become the new norm.
Our aesthetic has changed.
Take photography. It’s changed a lot in the 30 years or so since I first started being serious with a camera. Even in the 27 years, or so, since I got into the nuts and bolts of the making of pictures it’s changed, a lot. When I started I was looking at film stocks, and grain, and how to manipulate them; when I couldn’t see them (did I push the film, and use a fine-grain developer; at a lower temp, or was I going to shoot it straight, but rush the time in the soup by increasing the temperature, etc.).
But the “look” was limited by the film, and the paper. Color prints had a wider range than slides. Slide film set the standards for “good” color, because magazines used “chromes” to illustrate. That meant five stops of range. That was often narrowed some, because saturation increased if you underexposed some, but at the cost of compressing the spectrum from black to white.
Digital has range closer to that wider range of color print. And in the past 10 years or so that color palette (as well as things like stacking several exposure to create “High Dynamic Range) has expanded. Along come plug-ins for editing software, and apps like instagram, to make it possible to recreate the lost look of days of yore.
Then, because some people think those are overdone, there is an apps to remove the instagram sort of effect. Normalise says it restores pictures which have been, “overdone” back to the way they were. Which is well and good, but the folks at Buzzfeed went and applied the app to scans of actual photos from the ‘60s.
Which is fine, but what got me was this sentence, And it follows that, since Instagram's filters are based in on an aesthetic defined by actual old camera hardware and film, it should work near as well on real old photographs. It kind of does! Here's Andy Warhol sneezing, for example:
Which they followed with some other photos and then this, But this old (Kodachrome?) portrait of John Lennon looks a bit more real.
Real? Not to my eye. The originals look as I recall such photos looking. I actually found the Lennon shot to be much more fake looking. Not that it doesn’t look like Lennon, but rather that it looks like Lennon if you took his picture with a cheap digital camera.
But cheap digital cameras have become the new norm.
Our aesthetic has changed.
