Re:Clinically clean lenses are destroying what makes cameras...
by orbital-decay on Saturday July 09, 2022 @02:27AM
(#32032426)
Assuming we're not talking about technical photography - cameras don't capture the real world, neither do they capture impressions. They capture flat projections of the scene, frozen in time and displayed on the flat media with limited dynamic range and gamut. The human brain doesn't operate pictures at all. It reconstructs a set of ideas about the scene, and relationships between entities, which makes it impossible to represent the scene in a single picture - because those ideas are usually contradictory.
Here's an example: perspective works completely differently in a photo. Brain "sees" a heavily nonlinear perspective with the focused objects seem closer, but at the same time all straight lines are perceived as straight. This is impossible to represent in a photo, it has either linear or curvilinear perspective but not both simultaneously. Non-photography artists such as painters or game developers often mix different perspective planes in one work to depict this, but this is also just a rough imitation of what they really see or imagine.
Everything else works similarly. The dynamic range can't be represented in a camera+monitor system (or camera + printed media). The colors are impressions by definition, but are also skewed by illusions well known from the color theory. The motion requires you to use longer exposures, motion blur, and composition to convey in a static photo. Sense of depth, same story.
Nothing you see can be "faithfully" represented in a photo. The best you can do is to interpret the scene yourself and use crude artistic tools (tonemapping in post, composition, capture-time camera tools such as DoF etc) to hope that it will induce more or less the same impressions when viewed. Painters use extremely low-contrast media for centuries yet are able to convey the impression of a blinding sun, exploiting the human perception artifacts.
You can see the non-ideal lens as one of those capture-time tools to convey a certain impression. It might be imperfect at that, it doesn't induce the same impression in everyone, it can be imitated in post with technical precision - sure.
People who make or listen to different mixes, listen to music with their own settings they like more, abandon FLAC in favor of vinyl, people who don't care about high fidelity in general outside of archiving, just embrace this point as well.
Here's an example: perspective works completely differently in a photo. Brain "sees" a heavily nonlinear perspective with the focused objects seem closer, but at the same time all straight lines are perceived as straight. This is impossible to represent in a photo, it has either linear or curvilinear perspective but not both simultaneously. Non-photography artists such as painters or game developers often mix different perspective planes in one work to depict this, but this is also just a rough imitation of what they really see or imagine.
Everything else works similarly. The dynamic range can't be represented in a camera+monitor system (or camera + printed media). The colors are impressions by definition, but are also skewed by illusions well known from the color theory. The motion requires you to use longer exposures, motion blur, and composition to convey in a static photo. Sense of depth, same story.
Nothing you see can be "faithfully" represented in a photo. The best you can do is to interpret the scene yourself and use crude artistic tools (tonemapping in post, composition, capture-time camera tools such as DoF etc) to hope that it will induce more or less the same impressions when viewed. Painters use extremely low-contrast media for centuries yet are able to convey the impression of a blinding sun, exploiting the human perception artifacts.
You can see the non-ideal lens as one of those capture-time tools to convey a certain impression. It might be imperfect at that, it doesn't induce the same impression in everyone, it can be imitated in post with technical precision - sure.
People who make or listen to different mixes, listen to music with their own settings they like more, abandon FLAC in favor of vinyl, people who don't care about high fidelity in general outside of archiving, just embrace this point as well.