23 April 2004

A Closer Look: Pictures

Bill Dembowski

Pictures. We look at them every day, but usually only superficially. Let's take a closer look at some of the more popular types, beginning with the one that you are looking at right now.

Computer Monitor

When taking this image with a computer-linked digital camera, it was amazing how the colors kept changing. Not knowing much about such things, I wonder if it is a form of visual feedback along the same lines as the aural feedback one gets from microphone/speaker interaction. Simply holding a 16x magnifier up to the screen does not reveal the same effect (in real time).

TELEVISION SCREEN

This is surprisingly different from the computer monitor image.

Newsprint

Technically known as the half-tone process, there are no actual grays in the image. Gray is only an illusion created by the distribution and size of black and white dots.

Magazine

A color image is, obviously, more complex than the simple black and white one above. It is interesting that it utilizes colors that the unaided eye cannot separately discern.

Photographic Negative

This is Kodak T-Max 3200 film magnified 400x. As an avid photographer since my early teens, I find it interesting that conventional film photography is already so old (although not much more than 150 years) that it is exceeded in age only by the following category.

Oil Painting

Just to prove that you can never be sure of what you will find even under moderate magnification, the diagonal line in this image is a bristle of the artist's brush that dislodged and became imbedded in the paint.

Click image to enlarge.