"Tom Phillips" wrote in message
...


Richard Knoppow wrote:

recordings.
Now, having said all this basically I disagree with
the
original premise that electonic images are not
photography.
They obviously are despite any argument about longevity.


They obviously are not, Richard, since

1. the process are different and produce different
results.

2. Digital silicon sensors do not and cannot produce a
photograph. What they do produce is a voltage based on the
photoelectric effect. This is then regenerated into
digital
signals that are then used to output reproductions of
those
signals. At no time during this process is there an
optical
image nor any photograph. A photograph is an image produce
by
the direct action of light. Digital does not do this nor
can
it. The physics don't allow it.

3. The ISO standard states definitively digital still
cameras
produce a signal that _represents_ still pictures, not
actual
pictures.

As I've pointed out in my posts in rec.photo.darkroom (now
being cross posted and the discussion deliberately taken
out
of context...), people need to look at the processes to
determine what digital is vs. what photography is. Looking
at the end result is misleading, since in our society the
words photo and photographic have come to idiomatically
mean
any image we see. But as we all well know calendars,
though
we call them photos/photographs, are not. They are offset
reproductions. Simialrly paintings are pictures, but they
are
not photographs. Digital produces pictures and
reproductions,
but there is no original photograph created by digital
imaging.


What is the definition of Photography? I think that
fixing it as a method of producing pictures via a particular
chemical process is not sufficiently broad. Is television
photographic, it is completely electronic (I am excepting
the use of motion pictures are original material, they are
transmitted by electronic means). I think this argument
confuses the method with the result. Digital photographs are
"pictures" as much as chemical ones are once they get to the
finished form.
If silicon or any other elecronic sensors (they are not
digital) do not produce pictures what do they produce? If
you say an electronic signal you are partially right, that
_is_ what comes out of the sensor, but it is not the
_result_ of what comes from the sensor. The _result_ IS a
picture.
Also, "electronic" is not interchangibe with "digital".
ALL of the electronic signals used for digital imaging
purposes represent analogue functions. Even those which
start out in life in the digital domain, such as the output
of graphics generators, are meant to be translatable to
analogue form in order to be meaningful to the human
sensorium. Digital referes to a method of encoding analogue
information in order to store or transmit it. In some ways
digitally incoded information is superior to the original
analogue information for transmission or storage (and in
some ways is not). This has nothing to do with the process a
user goes through. A person using an electronic camera to
produce images which are to be reproduced on a computer
screen or printed on a computer printer, can be a
photgrapher just as much as someone using chemical methods.
It is the production of the image that defines the process
not the means.


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Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA