So we had our meeting with Joasia again today… for some reason I thought I was in at 10 and not 11, and so turned-up a little bit ealry, but it was ok, as the other half of the year had their meeting then, so I joined in there… the groups aren’t that formal, I don’t think anyway. We had to pitch our ideas for the big essay coming-up. I’ve decided to do digital photography; regarding its roots, current artistic processes and how its regarded in both fields that it spans – digital art, and photography. It was at this point that Joasia and I hit a sticking point! As it turns out, it was a good thing that I turned-up early as we had a bit of a long discussion about our opinions! 
I am of the belief that it covers both aspects of the artistic mediums, however Joasia pointed out the fact that the computers were being used as tools to output a photograph, and that the digital element was not infact the medium. She reffered me to a book called Digital Art by Christaine Paul which I promptly went out and bought. Although I didn’t have time to read the book properly, I asked to see Joasia later on to further discuss the topic, and its validity concerning the essay. I decided to stick to my guns and tried to explain that digital photography is not physically possible without a computer, and to compound this fact, it’s not simply the fact that an actual photograph has been scanned and stored, then printed using a computer, but that the digital camera itself (on fully automatic mode) defines how it should best capture an image, then it is tranferred digitally to the computer, which then again decides how to display it on the screen using various algorithms. We still didn’t reach a mutual understanding, but came to an amacable agreement!
It can be argued that digital photography only exists because of the detailed, and varied systems in place that the mdeium uses. The fact that an analogous image, of what we believe we see in real life, appears on the screen is what makes many people believe that digital photography is simply the same as photography. I’ve studied both. They’re not. Let me introduce these definitions of photography:
An image, especially a positive print, recorded by a camera and reproduced on a photosensitive surface.
a representation of a person or scene in the form of a print or transparent slide; recorded by a camera on light-sensitive material.
A digital photograph by its very definition is screen based. When an image is printed, it is no longer a digital photograph, but a print. I know that I can pick-up a proccessed negative strip, hold it up to the light, and see a photograph. I can hold the raw data in my hand and see the picture. I don’t know if I’m going blind, but can you see the picture here…
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I can’t. Mind you that’s only a small section… maybe I’d have to have a really big monitor to see the whole thing, then it might be apparent… but I doubt it. That’s part of a small jpeg that was opened in Word. I rather foolishly opened a RAW format picture from my EOS 350D in word… it was over 3,000 pages long! My point being that software and hardware are as much as a fundamental core of digital phototography, as much as the captured analogous image is. The fact that digital ‘photography’ is named as it is, is because it’s the closest parrallel to an understandable notion of data manipulation that we can understand.
I may explain this further in another meeting, but at the moment Joasia and I have come to an agreement that I shall read the book, and some other potentially useful referances, and whilst doing so, I shall concentrate on notions of authorship, curation and reliance upon the internet. Right, I’m off to read a little more of the book!
ps. as a note to myself, I must remember to exaplify the fact that digital artists, work in an rgb environment, and graphic designers who intend to output their work to print work in a cmyk colour envirnment. I’ll leave that for another day though.
