Figure 1 – Informal picture of the photographer at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor with “Giant Crab,” (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Photography is arguably the art of the instant, or at least it pretends to be.  And there are many consequences of instantaneity.  While I am not going to argue that before photography there never was an informal, candid, or comic portrait, we must conclude that photography has transformed portraiture and our concept of it.  The transformation began with the advent of the Daguerrean Parlor, when a man or woman could walk in, pay a relatively small price, and walk out with a little portrait.  As we have discussed it was the dawn of a new democratic age.  Indeed, we still wax poetically about these early portraits.  And then, of course, there was George Eastman and the revolution of the instantaneous, and often mediocre, that he created. Indeed, you could become quite impatient waiting for your prints to come back.  Hence we had the invention of both the 1 hour photoservice and of the Polaroid instant photographic system – more mediocrity for the most part.

And now we find ourselves, or have propelled ourselves, into the new age of the digital photograph, where gratification is truly instantaneous and were we, more often than not, do not even require prints.  The carbon-free age is upon us. You don’t really need to embrace any of this.  It will happily call you Minivar Cheevy and  leave you behind.

So I really encourage you to embrace it.  Lay out the years of family holiday portraits on your dining room table and marvel at the connected story and the transformation.  That’s your family, their history, their triumph.  The silly photographs of family and friends wearing bizarre hats and mugging for the camera are some of the best.  People are smiling and laughing, freed from the confines and strictures of formal portraiture – free to display their true selves.

My research group has gotten in the habit when out on scientific trips to find some kitschy icon, usually a silly statue, and photograph ourselves in front of it.  We’ve got, for instance, Big Bird at the University of Michigan’s Children’s Hospital and Snoopy from the Minneapolis Airport.  Figure 1 is our latest, yours truly sitting in front of a giant Chesapeake Crab at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

The selfie even frees you from needing someone else or a tripod and timer to take a self portrait.  Witness, of course, Pope Francis and the world’s first papal selfie. This is all lots of fun.  The only point that I would make is that I am a bit tired of seeing technically poor images on social media – flared images, out of focus images, improperly color corrected images.  There’s really no excuse for any of this and it is a downside of services like Instagram and of the perceived need to take the quest for instantaneity just a bit too far.  I guess that what I am suggesting is that you should strive for spontaneity but eschew mediocrity.   Digital photography, with all the automatic processing that it provides, is designed to create fabulous pictures, a little circumspection is the key.

Rescued baby sloth to be returned to the wild – but not so fast. From the Wikimedia Commons, original image uploaded by Ken Mayer creative commons license.

Hurumph!  An old friend has accused me of being rather maudlin on this blog.  I suppose that what she wants is cute cuddly baby animal pictures.  Even I have been known to do it, but not so much!  OK, so let’s get it out of our systems.  Please visit this collection of such warm and fuzzy images. And I have one especially for friend and reader Reebs.  If you still need more visit Facebook.  People are endlessly posting such images there and elsewhere on the web.  It is certainly an escape from the cruel heartless reality of our world.  But as I told my friend, A. E. Housman pretty much summed it up in  “The Shropshire Lad (verse LXII) 1919:”

“Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
‘Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.

I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.”

Figure 1 – Miniature human faces printed with a 3d printer. Image from the Wikimedia Commons, original image by S Zillayali and uploaded under creative commons license.

I was looking at a picture by Dan Kitwood for Getty Images today on the BBC News showing two women staring in wonder and amazement at a 3D Model of Party Leader Nick Clegg created with a 3D printer at the Lib Dem autumn conference in Glasgow.  Your first reaction is probably well done photograph; but the 3D printing process still has a long way to go.  After all, the model shown in the picture took seven hours to print.  Well, it isn’t so long ago that we were working with low resolution 16 color printers in 2D and could go pretty much go off for lunch while they printed a picture.These were hardly up to the task of competing with film photography.  But look where we are really just a short while later.

3D Printing is a type of Rapid Prototyping Process that can produce full color 3D objects from a CAD input within hours.  It is relatively low cost compared to other rapid prototyping technologies.  It sounds impossible, but if you think about it we can print in 2D quite easily and a 3D object is really a set of very thin, typically 100 um, cross-sections or 2D prints.  There are a number of competing technologies at present to accomplish this magic.

Typically, the starting point or input is a CAD drawing, a computer aided design.  But as seen in Figure 1, human faces can be copied by 3D printing. The device is creating really complicated objects, as seen for instance in Figure 2.

The question then is whether 3D is the future of photography either via 3D printing or a 3D display technology such as holography.  I am seldom an early adopter.  However, I have recently found my laboratory using 3D printing to prototype our optical biosensing devices.  And, of course, there’s the Big Bang episode where Wolowitz and Koothrappali buy a 3D printer.  You imagine it; the machine prints it.  So hold your breath and prepare to be amazed.

Figure 2 – 3D printed model. From the Wikimedia Commons, original image uploaded by Axel Hindemith under creative commons license.

Figure 1 – Jacob A. Riis, “Bohemian Cigar Makers,1890.” From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

I have often stopped to wonder at the unique opportunity that looking at a daguerreotype or other nineteenth century photograph gives us to see for ourselves the people of that century, who would otherwise be lost to us completely.  Lost to us completely?  That statement expresses the bias that somehow a photograph is critical to establishing the reality of existence.  Ultimately, it isn’t really so.  We may laugh and cry with Shakespeare or Heloise, and there are no photographs of them.  Still photographs give us a unique perspective on the nineteenth century that we ultimately have of no predecessor century.

Ansel Adams wrote in his 1974 preface to the book “Jacob A. Riis” Photographer and citizen:”

“These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on the old dry plates of sixty years ago. [no one hundred]… I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows.  And they in turn seem to be aware of me.”

This two-way awareness is the result of the camera’s persona that we have been discussing.  The early camera was a presence. It had its own persona.  People were aware of it.  When captured in portrait they engaged the machine not the photographer, who may have seemed a disembodied voice.  We are not merely seeing the past, we are communicating with it.

When someone posed for a daguerreotype say for a loved one, perhaps far away, they were very deliberate in having their picture taken and were posing for that mystic entity called posterity as much as for someone in the present.  When the artist paints a picture, when the photographer takes a photograph, or when the author writes a book, the sense of posterity is ever present.  You hear that these are acts of ego,  vain attempts to gain immortality through fame.   I’m not so sure.  When someone plants a tree it is a selfless act for posterity.  The tree will be there.  You will not, and nobody will likely know that you planted it, still you take great pride in the loving act of planting.

This ties in profoundly with our discussion of the loss of the camera’s persona.  The cell phone and its kin make photography an impersonal act.  People become unaware of the camera, and even if they pose for it, the posing tends to be for the immediacy of moment, to be put up on someone’s Facebook page and then forgotten or retrieved with curiosity  a year or two later.

I think that we have to ask ourselves whether the cell phone camera creates a new paradox.  Does the device enlarge human communication immediately only to destroy the ability of the camera to communicate across greater expanses of time?  It is something to think about.

Figure 1 – An example of an artificial inteeligence system. The top image is the query image. The program called CIRES, for content based retieval system, then searches the web or other database to retrieve similar images, which are shown in the bottom.   The program is following a set of rules that define the image and here ultimately lead to magenta flower, butterfly optional. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

We have discussed the fact that cameras used to have a persona about them.  It was almost as if they were people.  You know, the person that never takes a good picture of you.  Today, cameras have become so small and so integrated into our lives that they have lost this persona.  They’re just there. And it is really a paradox because just as we have given our cameras artificial intelligence and therefore a real persona, we pretty much take them for granted.

Cameras with artificial intelligence?  It almost seems like a silly statement to make.  Part of the problem is that we take artificial intelligence for granted.  Ray Kurzweil has pointed out in his book, “The Singularity is Near,” that every time we invent or create artificial intelligence, we call it something else.   And this is clearly the case for the modern digital camera.

Photography is a semi-complex process.  However, if you think about it, if you break it down, everything that you do in taking and processing a photography is a series of reasonably well thought out steps.  The process of automating a process, that is translating it from a task performed by a human to a task performed by an automata or machine is first translating the  criterion used  in the process, and then the steps come easily.

Perhaps the earliest element of the “taking a picture” process to be automated was automatic exposure.  We are really talking here about through the lens metering, and early systems worked by the process of taking an average or sometimes a central spot reading and setting that to the exposure and f-stop that would give you the intensity of neutral grey.  Such a system works in some cases but in others is wholly unacceptable.  So more and more exposure points were developed and the camera tried using a microprocessor to anticipate what was important to you.  Or you can give it a hint by setting to close-up, night scene, landscape, back-lit, whatever.  Don’t be so sure if you think that the human is still required.  The systems are getting better and better.

What about autofocus? The first autofocus systems were developed by Leica in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  By the 1980’s autofocus was becoming popular, widespread, and sought-after.  I remember as a proud Leica M3 rangefinder user  thinking at the time.  Who needs that?  Anyone can focus a camera.  Well, let me go on record and say that I was wrong, really way off.  The autofocus systems of today are just amazing.  Truly there a wee little person in my T2i doing all the work for me.  Yes sometimes I can do better with manual focus.  However, since they eliminated the split screen system it’s gotten a bit hard.

Think about the process of focusing.  How do you automate that process?  In the next few technical blogs I’d like to explore that process.  But for now let me just that automating the process was a matter of determining how the human brain measures sharpness of focus and then mimicking it using a microprocessor.

You might be inclined to say all right then but composition that’s untouchable.  As we move towards 2025, when it is predicted that we will have computer’s with the processing power of the human mind and something like forty years after that of the entire human race, I think it a mistake to say never. After all, when we compose we tend to follow, or violate, a set of rules or conventions.  That can be programmed into a machine.  The aesthetics of a beautiful woman, a sweet child, or a handsome man can all be pretty closely defined and will ultimately be translated into a machine language.

Right now I am a bit suspicious of the images coming off of the Hubble Space Telescope.  They are often so beautiful.  Is this because they are intrinsically so; or is someone cropping and choosing the color look up tables to make them appealing to human viewers? However, ultimately, perhaps regrettably, all of our aestheticisms can be measured and coded.

It is also important to remember that all of the processing power need not be on a chip inside your camera.  The infinity of the cloud is available. Siri is not inside your IPhone, but rather somewhere on a big computer in Cupertino, CA.

In the meanwhile we can marvel at the complexity of our cameras and the degree to which artificial intelligence has been incorporated into them.  My suggestion is that you decide on whether your camera’s persona is male or female.  Then give him or her a name.  Start talking to this person.  Pretty soon they will be responding.

I was at a dinner party the other night when I observed an antique rite. People were looking at a package of snapshots.  While it is not as antiquated as, say, practicing the Elysian mysteries, and we can be grateful that no animal sacrifice was involved, it was nevertheless antiquated.  In fact, I cannot tell you when I last looked at a stack of photographic prints fresh from their little, once Kodak envelopes.  And I certainly don’t miss squinting at someone’s slide through a hand slide viewer.

I was relieved, at least, to observe that these were not film prints, but rather digital ones.  Still the reality is that when you say something like “Do you have any pictures of your adorable children,” you no longer expect the person that you are asking to dig through his/her wallet and pull out a dogeared print of buck-toothed little Billy and pigtailed Mary Sue.  Today the pics are shown to you on a smart phone, computer pad, or laptop.

Of course, this is only the latest in a long chain of events that progressed photography from scarcity to plenty.  First you went to the Daguerrean Parlor to have a single (although multiples were a possibility) made and placed in a fancy little case that you either carried close to your heart or displayed with pride on the mantel.  It was at once a much beloved keepsake as it was a symbol of affluence.  Then there were albumin prints, and tin prints. And of course the great democratizing event was George Eastman’s invention of roll film and the box camera.  And now my generation has stacks of envelopes in drawers and boxes as well as albums filled with deteriorating color prints.  My sister and I cleaned out our parents apartment; so I harbor no illusions of what will become of these.

The profoundest point in all of this is that something else is slowly changing.  It used to be that the goal of the art was to produce a print.  Prints have a somewhat limited and nonlinear dynamic range, but wonderful resolution.  Until very recently, every photograph that I did was aimed at the production of a great print (or at least a masterly print) and every one that I viewed to be of value I had printed.  More recently I have been taking so many photographs, and I have to say, experimented with so many images, that I don’t always print them out.  And this is not a value judgment. While I have settled upon a very excellent print service in BayPhoto, and while these prints don’t take up so much room in the archival portfolios that I use, I now don’t print them all.  The fact is that more often then not, when I show them to someone, it will be electronic. This is especially true when I share them on this website or through social media.  So here it is September 19. 2013 and we find ourselves, yet again, plummeting headlong along the path of photographic evolution.  The next innovation, the one we cannot yet anticipate, is just around the corner.