UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL EXPOSURE:

Part 1: Exposure Reduction for Highlight Retention
Part 2: Digital Exposure & Noise
Part 3: When Blocked-up Shadows Aren’t Really
Part 4: Take a Balanced Approach to White Balance
Part 5: Dynamic Range
Part 6: Extending the Tonal Range
Part 7: What’s the Real Difference Between RAW and JPEG?

GENERAL:

1) COST-EFFECTIVE PHOTOGRAPHY
2) CONTROL THE RANGE OF FOCUS
3) IMAGE INTERPOLATION
4) LOSE THE DEAD SHOTS
5) SCANNING 35MM FILM
6) THE RAW vs. JPEG DEBATE…
7) IS PHOTOGRAPHY EASY?
8) MUST EVERYTHING HAVE AN ADOBE SLANT?
9) A CAMERA TO PAINT WITH
10) WHAT'S THIS COMPOSITION THING ABOUT?

A Camera to paint With

The Camera Obscura

At special times of the year (allegedly Christmas and the New Year) you'll have to channel-hop to get away from mainstream entertainment programming. But it's usually just a waste of time. You're sure to gradually sink into a one-eyed flicking stupor, ending up at the bigger numbers where Candi and Annabelle are sprawled over a sofa chatting to frustrated 16-year-olds.

I'm writing this early on New Year's Day and I'm glad to say that last night's TV turned out to be much better than I'd expected.

First up was an Irish language film about two blokes who get into a load of trouble over poteen. To cut an interesting story short, they end up drowning in a lake with a dead dog in a sack. This was a proper film, made back in 1976. It was lots better than everything else—the embarrassing sitcom only mid-teens would laugh at, the fatuous BBC celebrity quiz, Arnold Schwarzenegger disembowelling terrorists...

Poitin

Girl With a Pearl Earring

When it finished the very next hop dropped me into a movie where at first glance it seemed that an ageing 17th century rock star was taking a fancy to a serving wench wearing on her head one of those things a vet puts around your dog's neck.

But before I could hop away to crass American comedy, a large box was delivered and put on a table. The girl, suitably meek and demure, was very curious. “Do you know what it is?” he asked. She shook her head. He told her to look into the wooden box and threw his cloak over her head. To her astonishment she could see an image of the room they were in – the box was a camera obscura.

It's true that it was a bit too advanced for the period with a nice lens designed maybe 150 years later, but this is Hollywood where factual details never get in the way of a good story. And it is a good story.

In the 1660s the camera obscura (meaning dark room, or dark chamber) was a bit like one of our modern SLRs. (Well, maybe it needed a bigger neck strap.) It really represented the dawn of photography because an image of the real world was projected onto a flat surface. Back then people got a kick out of sitting in the dark looking at an image that moved. Much like today really, but without Angelina Jolie and Harry Potter, thankfully.

The really interesting thing here is that it was also possible to trace the outlines of the image onto a sheet of paper. In time of course this simple box and lens evolved into an amazing device that threw the image onto a sensitised surface that permanently recorded the scene.

The movie I'd unwittingly hopped into was an adaptation of a novel that briefly picked up on the fascinating theory that painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) used a camera obscura to create paintings that are believed to have distinctive photographic qualities. Well, they would, wouldn't they…

In fact, a clever professor has written a very interesting book on the subject.

The Music Lesson. An early photograph… sort of?

After a highly detailed examination of The Music Lesson's perspective and vanishing points (or something like that), the professor was able to accurately calculate both the scale of the painting and the height of its viewpoint. Other paintings by Vermeer seemed to suggest that they were created in the same room.

The professor meticulously analysed 12 paintings in total and was able to calculate exact measurements and similarities that strongly suggest the artist traced his work before applying more traditional painting methods. Indeed an X-ray of one of these paintings reveals a black and white version underneath that is probably the traced version.

It has been noted that details in Vermeer's paintings are remarkably accurate, probably because they are based on actual projections. These intriguing details include furniture, elaborate maps and bright highlights.

The professor went on to create a scale model of the room in the painting. After this impressive investigation he concluded that the only rational explanation was Vermeer did indeed project each scene through a lens.

So what can we say about Vermeer? He was certainly clever and innovative. Possibly a talented cheat? Maybe he knew he was on to something different and tried to keep it as much to himself as possible. He was surely doing all he could to accurately depict reality. In fact he was much like photographers today who work with more complex camera obscuras, finishing off their unique creations in image-editing software.

I'm a bit sorry now I hopped out of Girl With a Pearl Earring and went off to bed only to be wakened later by revellers' New Year fireworks. Even though the link to photography is tenuous, next time I'll be watching it the whole way through.

*The term camera obscura was first used in the early 17th century by German astronomer Johannes Kepler. He used the device in Austria for astronomical observations.

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