Now it’s easy
Are some things too easy to do nowadays?
A photographer whose blog we follow recently described one example of how technology has advanced in his field. In the days of film cameras, he set out to capture a certain moonlit scene. It was technically challenging, requiring all his knowledge and skill with film, chemicals and printing. His eventual success was marked by requests for prints from other photographers. But recently a friend of his caught a very similar moonlit scene using his iPhone and no particular technical skill. The device automatically made a series of exposures and combined them using software, giving a picture that was better in terms of exposure and similar details than the painstaking work of decades ago.
That reminded our astronomer of something similar in his field. He has an edition of the publications of Lick Observatory from 1908, containing photographs of galaxies. The use of photography in astronomy was new then, and this was a ground-breaking publication. He also has the Carnegie Atlas of Galaxies from 1994, at the very end of the era of chemical imaging for science. Of course the latter publication has better pictures, showing more and fainter detail. But nowadays a skilled amateur can produce an even better image, using a digital camera and software. The jump in quality from 1994 to 2014, twenty years, is greater than that from 1908 to 1994, over eighty.
And the difference in ease of producing the pictures is just as striking. The Lick photographs took up to four hours to expose, with the astronomer carefully working a fine control to keep the telescope exactly pointed at the galaxy the whole time. Carnegie exposures are generally under an hour, but still needed hand guiding. Not only do telescopes do their own guiding now, but many short-exposure images can be combined, making that task much less tricky. We note also the size of telescopes used, picking one galaxy (NGC 253) for comparison: for the Lick publication, a 36-inch reflector; for the Carnegie, 98-inch (2.5 meter); for one recent amateur image, 8 inches.
Do we conclude that the earlier efforts were wasted? In science, of course not. The Lick publication showed many things no one had suspected before, including hundreds of galaxies that hadn’t been found by visual observers. By the time of the Carnegie atlas, the size and shape of the universe (speaking loosely) had been at least roughed out using chemical photography. In a general sense, the imperfect and difficult earlier results show where later efforts should go.
But what about the photographer? Art does not advance in the same way science does, though it certainly advances. We think, though, his effort was worthwhile, based on another book of photographs we have.
This reproduces early work of William Henry Fox Talbot, who more or less invented the basic process of chemical photography. At that time, even getting a recognizable image was a technical triumph. There was no way to measure light, chemicals were not standardized, processes were still evolving. One would expect a book of mundane examples, displaying technical features of the new craft; like many a camera manual from the old days.
It is not. The photographs show a clear sense of art, of composition, of the impact an image can have. Fox Talbot was an artist. So is the photographer we started with. As the technical details get easier, the art and the science are easier to see. But not easier to do.
