(I didn’t dare call the piece “unlimited enlargement” but that’s what it is really about). One of the benefits of my lovely new camera is there is no real limit to the detail I can extract from a high quality jpeg that’s in focus. This means really that in some sort of pictures, the primary compositional activity is cropping. This is a thesis which cries out for illustration, which I will come back and supply with links when I have a moment. Just now I would simply observe what a wilderness of interpretation one enters when asking “How many pictures are there on this screen?”<\/p>\n\n
In some sense this is a question that goes back to darkrooms, but digital photography has made it far more urgent, for two reasons. One is the astonishing quality of detail obvious in even the smallest “print”. I am sure there is objectively more detail in a good 35mm slide than in a 6MB jpg. You won’t spot it on a light box, though. The image there is just so much smaller than what you see on screen.<\/p>\n\n
The second, of course, is the ease of cropping and recropping. And the way ion which one can generate a whole series of alternat crops with very little effort.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(I didn’t dare call the piece “unlimited enlargement” but that’s what it is really about). One of the benefits of my lovely new camera is there is no real limit to the detail I can extract from a high quality … Continue reading