Physics of photography and music

[EmilioL]

Hello! My background is in software (OS & device driver), electronics and formal logic. These days I write software applications for photography and (something completely different) music. I'd like to learn more about optics and about acoustics. Glad to be here and looking forward to interacting.

 

[anorlunda]

Welcome to PF

 

[Wrichik Basu]

These days I write software applications for photography and (something completely different) music

Applications like photoshop?

 

[EmilioL]

Nope. Optical stuff: exposure control, Zone System, shutter calibration, depth of field and opitmal focus, filter calculations, pinhole calculation, large format. Photography, not image post-processing Optics.

In case you're interested:

Photoshop is wonderful--especially for color correction--but what the lens doesn't capture is gone forever.. Once you've taken an under-exposed, noisy, fuzzy image, it's too late---information has been lost. According to information theory (sort of like thermodynamics), you can't get it back. All you can do is cover it up and make it less noticable. But blow up the resulting image to, say, 17 x 24 inches, and the damage and attemped repairs are very, very noticable.

Ideally, applications to assist the manual mode photographer would be available in digital cameras. But when the industry went digital,it went mass market, and started experiencing competition from cell phones (!). Electronics manufacturing has huge economies of scale. . The consumer (who makes up most of the market, even for high-end cameras) is obsessed with convenience, miniaturization and low price. Today it's not business-feasible to produce a camera model aimed at, say, fine art landscape photographers.

The consumer doesn't understand that miniaturization increases defraction (because light waves have a fixed size--f/64 is sharp on an 8 x 10" format camera).
He doesn't care--blurry images look fine on Facebook. He doesn't understand that smaller objectives mean (for the size sensor) less light-gathering power.
He doesn't care--he just turns up the ISO. He dosen't undersrtand the inherent limitations of AF and automated exposure. If the face-rognition algoriothm finds faces in tree bark or wall paper, he won't even notice that the subject is out of focus.

Only the person holding he camera knows what part of the image is his subject, what color it really is, and what effect he is trying to achieve. As Fred Pickens used to say, point-and-shoot a closeup of a white horse, and another of a black horse, and you will have two shots of a (middle) gray horse. The camera is doing the best it can with its dinky wittle bwain, but it only knows what it sees: abstract patterns of light and dark.

Cameras can't read minds. Ideally, they would ask the user questions, rather than guess. . But the consumer doesn't want to be bothered. If the camera makes the decisions then *it* is photographer--the person holding it is just the "bipod".

"Shoot lots, then cull", "let the camer do the thinking" and "fix it in Photoshop" are a recipe for bad photography. But that's the "high tech" way.

There are also issues regarding digital printing of collectable or museum quality prints (authentic original, gallery size, high-resolution, not pixellated, made of permanent materials). Negatives can't be copied without loss of quality, but image files can be copied and e-mailed. It ain't easy to dodge and burn, but at the touch of a button a digital printer will churn out identical "originals" untili it runs out of paper or ink. The idea that 1000 identical "originals" might show up on the market tomorrow has a chilling effect on buyers. This has caused a number of fine art photographers to revert to making optical prints.

Perhaps what made photography an art form was that it *was* difficult and "hand on"--like drawing, painting and sculpting (but in a different way). There are very few artists using CAD software to draw, paint software to paint, or 3D printers to produce sculptures. Something about a 4" tall sculpture made of orange plastic is not appealing...