Digital Photography (initial post, Bad Patti's Art 'n' Everything blog

[Pat Borow]

BadPatti’s Art and Everything Blog

Welcome to my brand-new site and blog. You may know me as Olfacta, author of OlfactaRama, or if you know me personally, by other names. 

Today, kiddies, we are going to talk about digital photography.

Digital photography and digital music have a lot in common. The sine wave (look it up) in film photography and analog music is smooth and continuous. The “wave” is digital anything isn’t.  It’s sawtoothed, the top range being the tops of all those cute li’l pixels. It’s jagged and rough, and a lot is left out of those little gaps. 

I prefer oil painting because it gives you such subtle colors, partly from refraction in oil vs. refraction in plastic. Acrylic — well, it’s fast. Brutal.  Shiny, like a CD. It doesn’t need those little gaps. It’s a for-God’s-sake-just-get-on-with-it medium, perfect for these times.

Film filled  in those gaps. The result was a smooth gradient. Warmth, like a vinyl record. Of course, film is dead. Besides, even if you had a film camera and the equipment to develop the images, they’d eventually have to be scanned and transformed into — guess what — digital, so they could be uploaded.

We have a fine digital camera. Ooooh, it does all the work for you. Ooooh, it’s so gorgeous. 

The computer inside it is more complicated than any real computer I’ve ever had.  Yesterday we tried to shoot my most recent oil painting, “The Last Wave,” with it. 

Around 145 tries to get one  that was sort of close, close enough so that a couple of hours of fiddling around in Photoshop made it a reasonable, well, facsimile. Turns out that the camera can’t handle graduations of color when they’re really, really close. Perhaps it’s sampling the room and averaging in colors we can’t see — which makes me wonder…oh, forget it. 

Photographing art is where the rubber meets the (yellow, brick) road.

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