Is a photograph more real than a digital image?

In the bonus documentaries that come with Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, there's a long demo of a waterfall scene that didn't make the final cut because it slowed down the action. Most of the components of the scene are digitally created, including all the water effects. The artist shows how he created the waterfall from image samples and overlays -- and then added noise and film grain. Film grain. Because the image looked too crisp and perfect.

So by making a digital image look like a photograph, it becomes more "realistic" to our eyes. Isn't that interesting? Photography connotes realism. And we make this judgment -- realistic or not realistic -- when viewing an image, even though we should consciously know that photos can be staged or completely manufactured.

"The medium is the message." -- Marshall McLuhan. When a digital image simulates a photo, is that two messages? Or is it just a mixed message? ;-)

Comments

Unknown said…
It didn't feel any less real when we stood in line for an hour yesterday waiting for our digital prints to load, waiting for the guy behind the counter to dig up the password so that we could use the machine, waiting for the girl who "came in at 6" to process the photos. joy!
10:15 PM
teletypeturtle said…
Experience may be as good a definition of realism as any other... (As Morpheus says, "What is real?")
11:31 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A "Pope of the Living Dead" Moment

Image
Yesterday morning I picked up the newspaper outside my door and saw this: Woah, hold onto your brains! Zombie Crisis in the Vatican! Anyway, after I took it out of the wrapper, the full picture emerged. Don't things like this make you wonder if the people doing front-page layout are awake, asleep, or trying to make us spit our coffee all over the paper?
Read more

What future? I don't even wear a watch.

I just finished reading The Unfinished Revolution: How to Make Technology Work for Us--Instead of the Other Way Around . This one is for a class, so it's outside the range of my usual reading list. Basically it's a manifesto on how computers could be made easier to use by making them more "human-centric" -- fitting the computer system to the way people need to use them, instead of forcing people to learn how to work to fit the computer. The author, Michael Dertouzos, was head of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, so his examples are filled with his own actual experiences using (guinea pigging?) experimental computer applications developed by colleagues. There's a flight-reservation system that operates on speech recognition technology instead of keyboard input, and a "meaning processor" that attempts to spider information as you use it and tag meaning on your behalf to create an ever-expanding index. The ideas are interesting, but they
Read more