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August 4, 2010
The computer network for the small office at Encounter Studio in Victor Harbor is now up and running thanks to the help from the locally based tech support. The backups of the music files and photos from the old Windows-based PC to the network are now chugging along--- they will be continue to do so over the next few days given the slowness of the backup.
Hopefully the PC, which is on its last legs, will last long enough to complete the backups to the two Lacie external hard drives that form the storage part of the network. Finally, I have the professional, reliable, central storage for instantly storing, sharing, and backing up from any PC or Mac on my network.
The post-production photographic software has been loaded, and I've begun to experiment with it: reworking a digital colour photography into a black and white one using Silver Efex Pro. So my transition to the world of digital photography is complete. Goodbye to the dirty old world of smelly chemicals and darkrooms.
Some say that digital photographs function in an entirely different way from traditional photographs. The most common argument is that digital imaging destroys the innocence of straight photography by making all photographs inherently mutable. Does it? Lev Manovich in The Paradoxes of Digital Photography asks:
Shall we accept that digital imaging represents a radical rupture with photography? Is a picture, mediated by computer and electronic technology, radically describe film-based images using such categories as depth of field, zoom, a shot or montage, what categories should be used to describe digital images? Shall the phenomenon of digital imaging force us to rethink such fundamental concepts as realism or representation?
Manovich draws attention to one important distinction between analogue and digital photography which is the mutability of the image that has been highlighted by WJT Mitchell in his The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-photographic Era. In this text Mitchell identifies straight, unmanipulated photography as the essential, "normal" photographic practice:
There is no doubt that extensive reworking of photographic images to produce seamless transformations and combinations is technically difficult, time-consuming, and outside the mainstream of photographic practice. When we look at photographs we presume, unless we have some clear indications to the contrary, that they have not been reworked.
This equation of "normal" photography with straight photography allows Mitchell to claim that a digital image is radically different because it is inherently mutable:
the essential characteristic of digital information is that it can be manipulated easily and very rapidly by computer. It is simply a matter of substituting new digits for old... Computational tools for transforming, combining, altering, and analyzing images are as essential to the digital artist as brushes and pigments to a painter.
Mitchell's argument is that because of the difficulty involved in manipulating them, photographs were comfortably regarded as causally generated truthful reports about things in the real world. Digital images, being inherently (and so easily) mutable, call into question our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real. Furthermore, in a digital image, the essential relationship between signifier band signified is one of uncertainty.
Manovich com technology and the tradition of montage and collage with the essence of digital imaging. what Mitchell takes to be the essence of photographic and digital imaging technology are two traditions of visual culture. Both existed before photography, and both span different visual technologies and mediums.
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Mac rules! - P C F R E E , yeah ...
malE + Bh