Photographs and images

Technology can make images much more expressive and creative than even a decade or two ago.  Mostly, it hasn’t.

It’s a truism among photographers that the way people look at pictures (or “consume images” if you’re being pompous) has changed enormously over the past decades.  In the Old Days, a picture was a physical object, even if printed in a newspaper or bound in a book.  Nowadays, pictures are mostly viewed on a smartphone; or, if you really want quality, on a computer.  The actual print is vastly outnumbered by the digital view.

But the actual print, from a technical point of view, can be of much higher quality that it has every been.  A dedicated photographer has enormous control over the digital file, which is much more flexible than even the best chemical emulsion.  And a careful match to the printer, paper and ink can be made, closer than any silver-halide paper allowed.  Of course it takes a great deal of work, care and some talent to produce a top-quality digital print.  The same was always true of an analog one.

The print, however, has limitations.  From the darkest blacks to the brightest whites, an image on paper has at the utmost a difference in reflectance of maybe 200 to 1, through 100 to 1 is a more practical limit.  An actual sunlit scene can have a range of a million to one.  It is a triumph of the eye-brain system that a physical photograph can give not only a cartoon impression but a convincing rendering of the world.  One of the attractions of a transparency, a slide, was that being projected on a screen it was inherently luminous, even though it had a smaller range of actual brightness.

We are no longer limited to the print.  Electronic displays are not dependent on reflecting available light, and certain types have a wider range of brightness than paper.  In addition, they can be calibrated so that the color of available light has no effect on the display (though it will unavoidably affect the viewer’s eye).  There is the potential for a much more flexible, and hence expressive, sort of image.  It is very rarely realized.  Almost no one bothers to calibrate a computer display, and any possible controls on a smartphone are crude.  Convenience has beaten quality once again.

But spare a thought for those photographers who are still trying.