Where will B&W be in 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 .... years

Gregory Blank wrote:

In article ,
bob wrote:

I would tell you how my unabridged Webster's defines
photograph, but then I would have to define photography for you too.

Is it this year's edition? Word meanings change. Words mean what people
want them to mean.

Yeah but then no one else understands what the heck that someone
is saying.

Reminds of the movie Airplane, when no one could understand
the hip brothers and square housewife June Cleaver got up
("it's O.k., I speak Jive...")

Gregory Blank wrote:

In article ,
Tom Phillips wrote:

The intent of camera manufacturers is marketing, not
scientific definitions. Digital cameras are illusory;
they are made to look and feel like film cameras when
in fact they could have any number of forms, don't have
shutters (instead you hear a "sound effect"),

Mine does I can see it move from the front side of the lens as I capture
the image.

Conventional shutters aren't required or necessary.

From Jim Brick (an engineer at Agilent Technologies) posting on
the Leica mailing list:

Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002
From: Jim Brick
Subject: [Leica] The M7d

"But just so you are a little more informed, digital sensors do "not"
require a shutter. The shutter is a pulse to the sensor substrate that,
in lay terms, opens the pixels to collect light, then closes them. The
pulse width determines the shutter speed. The camera shutter basically
does nothing. Many cameras have "live" mode where the LCD on the back
acts like a live viewfinder. To do this, the camera shutter, if there is
one, is open in what we used to call "T" or Time exposure. Basically the
shutter is simply out of the way. The sensor is in a decimation mode in
that it only delivers every 4th pixel row and 4th column. This allows
the image to be read out fast enough to update the LCD reasonably
rapidly. The decimation is also to size the image down to the LCD size.
Then when you push the "shutter release", you are simply sending a pulse
to the sensor to capture the image, at full resolution, at whatever
"shutter speed" has been selected. The shutter noise coming out of 99%
of the digital cameras is a .wav file sent to a speaker in the camera."


Also from: International Standard ISO 12231
Prepared by Technical Committee ISO/TC 42, Photography.
Photography — Electronic still picture imaging — Terminology

"The meaning of shutters and exposure time is also different for
digital image capture devices, because an electronic imaging sensor,
usually a charge-coupled device (CCD), has image acquisition
characteristics which are different from those of film...Electronic
still picture imaging concepts are drawn from traditional photography
....[but] in some cases the concepts must be redefined to apply to
electronic still picture imaging..."

In article ,
Tom Phillips wrote:

"But just so you are a little more informed, digital sensors do "not"
require a shutter. The shutter is a pulse to the sensor substrate that,
in lay terms, opens the pixels to collect light, then closes them. The
pulse width determines the shutter speed. The camera shutter basically
does nothing. Many cameras have "live" mode where the LCD on the back
acts like a live viewfinder. To do this, the camera shutter, if there is
one, is open in what we used to call "T" or Time exposure. Basically the
shutter is simply out of the way. The sensor is in a decimation mode in
that it only delivers every 4th pixel row and 4th column. This allows
the image to be read out fast enough to update the LCD reasonably
rapidly. The decimation is also to size the image down to the LCD size.
Then when you push the "shutter release", you are simply sending a pulse
to the sensor to capture the image, at full resolution, at whatever
"shutter speed" has been selected. The shutter noise coming out of 99%
of the digital cameras is a .wav file sent to a speaker in the camera."


Also from: International Standard ISO 12231
Prepared by Technical Committee ISO/TC 42, Photography.
Photography — Electronic still picture imaging — Terminology

"The meaning of shutters and exposure time is also different for
digital image capture devices, because an electronic imaging sensor,
usually a charge-coupled device (CCD), has image acquisition
characteristics which are different from those of film...Electronic
still picture imaging concepts are drawn from traditional photography
...[but] in some cases the concepts must be redefined to apply to
electronic still picture imaging..."

I am not saying its required mind you ;-)

--
LF Website @ http://members.verizon.net/~gregoryblank

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong,
is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
to the American public."--Theodore Roosevelt, May 7, 1918

Wow! Your question has certainly released a deluge of non-answers.

It was no time at all before the old digital vs. chemical debate erupted;
and your question didn't mention anything about a 1000 years from now, or
whether or not processes would be archival.

My own opinion is that black and white, in whatever physical form, will be
alive and well over the modest time span you mention. And not because of
its medium or archivality(is that a word?), but because it is an abstraction
as an art form. A well known photograph of the simple pepper by Edward
Weston is still admired, while if it was a color photograph of the same
subject, it would just be a picture of a pepper! It is the abstractness,
not the medium that matters.

John



"Nicholas O. Lindan" wrote in message
ink.net...
Forecast the future of B&W.

Where do you think it will be in:

5 years?

10 years?

20 years?

50 years?

If there is enough participation the average of the
predictions often turns out to be pretty accurate.

--
Nicholas O. Lindan, Cleveland, Ohio
Consulting Engineer: Electronics; Informatics; Photonics.
To reply, remove spaces: n o lindan at ix . netcom . com
psst.. want to buy an f-stop timer? nolindan.com/da/fstop/

Tom Phillips wrote:

Clearly you are not into the factual science behind
the processes. Big difference between photochemical and
photoelectric. One produces a chemical reaction; the
other a voltage. Your professor didn't articulate well;
everything is chemically based, including the words
that comes from your brain to your finger tips, but
that's not the same thing as a as sound from a
loudspeaker.


And your nervous system is electrically based.

Atoms retain their shape and owe their
chemical characteristics to the arrangement
of their orbital electrons.

Chemistry and electronics are intertwined
at the most fundamental levels of matter.

So what was your point?


rafe b.
http://www.terrapinphoto.com

Gregory Blank wrote:

In article ,
Tom Phillips wrote:

"But just so you are a little more informed, digital sensors do "not"
require a shutter. The shutter is a pulse to the sensor substrate that,
in lay terms, opens the pixels to collect light, then closes them. The
pulse width determines the shutter speed. The camera shutter basically
does nothing...The shutter noise coming out of 99% of the digital cameras
is a .wav file sent to a speaker in the camera."

I am not saying its required mind you ;-)

But people like to think (be fooled) that they're
using a real camera instead of a scanner and doing
real photography. A pretty effective strategy too,
those .wav file sound effects. It must be a real
camera if you have an authentic shutter sound effect

As P.T Barnum once drooled, "There's a sucker born
every minute."

Tom Phillips wrote:

The intent of camera manufacturers is marketing, not
scientific definitions. Digital cameras are illusory;

This won't be the last time that marketing campaigns succeed in changing
word usage. But even without the marketing campaigns, I doubt that all
the professional photographers in the world would be willing to give up
their titles just because you don't want to allow the usage to change.


they are made to look and feel like film cameras when
in fact they could have any number of forms, don't have
shutters (instead you hear a "sound effect"),

They do have shutters. Some of them have a silly sound effect too.

and other
than a lens have nothing else in common with film cameras.

They also have a light sensitive receptor that records the light falling
on it.

[history lesson deleted]

As I've said many times before, we idiomatically tend to
call any image we see a "photograph," but this isn't what
a photograph is and everyone knows it, just as we know
"Puffs" are not really "Kleenex."

Everyone? You paint with a really broad brush.

output are just that, reproductions. A photograph OTOH is
any photochemically actuated image or "drawing" (not just
strictly silver gelatin) derived directly from the action
of light on photosensitized material, something that hasn't
changed in over 200 years.

So when I output a digital file onto a Fuji Frontier, and it uses laser
light to draw on silver halide paper, and then C-41 chemicals to develop
the said paper, how is that not a photograph? It certainly seems to fit
all the criteria in your definitions. On the other hand, your definition
would seem to include making silk screens, but I don't think most people
would consider that to be photography.

And it won't change in another
200 years since it is a matter of science and chemistry,
not idiomatic word misappropriations.

That's the part where you're just flat out wrong. Words mean what the
people who use them want them to mean, regardless of what 200 year old
scientific texts say. I don't have a lot of 200 year old books, but I
have a few. Words mean different things now than they did then, and
words will mean different things in the future.

Bob

In article ,
Tom Phillips wrote:
The intent of camera manufacturers is marketing, not
scientific definitions. Digital cameras are illusory;
they are made to look and feel like film cameras when
in fact they could have any number of forms, don't have
shutters (instead you hear a "sound effect"), and other
than a lens have nothing else in common with film cameras.

Please compare a Nikon F6 film camera to the D2X digital camera and list
which parts of the F6 are not in the D2x (or not needed).

1) Parts related to film advance.

Anything else? I doubt that the D2X is going to work without a mechanical
shutter (although it is possible that the mechanical shutter no longer
controls the amount of light that reaches the sensor).


--
That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it
could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done
by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make.
-- Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Gregory Blank wrote:
In article ,
bob wrote:


Is it this year's edition? Word meanings change. Words mean what people
want them to mean.


Yeah but then no one else understands what the heck that someone
is saying.

When I said "people" I meant plural, not individuals.



I think you have it backwords, Tom,Wayne and the majority of people
doing and that have done Darkroom photography (stated here as such to
placate you)

That's a major qualification. I was talking about the population at
large (the millions of people who use the words "photography" and
"photograph", and now you're restricting the conversation to darkroom
workers.

understand photography at its core meaning that is
generated onto film and made manifest onto silver based papers. That is
the way its been phrased for two hundred + years.

Maybe most darkroom workers do think that film is necessary for
photography to occur. Film is not necessary for prints on silver based
papers though.

I wonder what Ansel would think.

Bob

rafeb wrote:

Tom Phillips wrote:

Clearly you are not into the factual science behind
the processes. Big difference between photochemical and
photoelectric. One produces a chemical reaction; the
other a voltage. Your professor didn't articulate well;
everything is chemically based, including the words
that comes from your brain to your finger tips, but
that's not the same thing as a as sound from a
loudspeaker.

And your nervous system is electrically based.

Atoms retain their shape and owe their
chemical characteristics to the arrangement
of their orbital electrons.

Chemistry and electronics are intertwined
at the most fundamental levels of matter.

So what was your point?

The point is what comes out of your mouth
isn't the same as what gets blared from your
car radio speakers (o.k., politician's mouths
excepted.) They represent different physical
processes, i.e., as in oceans are not monkeys
even though they both have H2O as the main
component. Get it? Or consider that a _photograph_
can be made chemically using virtually no
technology (i.e., no industrially manufactered
and doped wafers and electronics.) Go ahead,
try making a digital "photo" that way, then try
to claim what you see on your computer screen
is the same process as Talbot's 1839 Calotypes.

So, what's _your_ point besides the fact that you
and I have the same hydrogen atoms as stars? Or
that both you and a TV set has an electrical
system? Don't know about you, but I'm just a wee
bit differently than a TV set and so is photochemical
vs. digital.

Clearly, the ability to adequately differentiate
in the abstract is lacking around here...