You need to read Om’s blog post Why iPhone is today’s Kodak Brownie Camera It reminded me of my home-brew digital camera about 35 years ago (the Meltdown the ferret photo is in this post - probably the first digital image of a ferret).
Digital photography - at least how we usually think of photography (more on that later) - was invented in 1975 by Steve Sasson at Kodak. (a fun NY Times piece) Charged coupled devices (CCDs) used to capture the image, had been invented at Bell Labs a few years earlier. Sasson used one made by Fairchild for his experiments. I had read a bit about digital cameras when I built mine, but decided to used a modified DRAM memory chip because I could get one for nothing and it seemed like a reasonable thing to try. It was just that - fooling around with some hardware and writing a bit of software for fun. The fact that it captured my only record of my ferret Meltdown made it special.
But there’s another form of digital image making. Experimental particle physics people moved from detecting events with regular photography (bubble chambers and film emulsions) to electronic counters. Around 1968 the multiwire proportional chamber revolutionized the field and set the stage for dramatic discoveries that lead to the Standard Model - still the best description of three of the four fundamental forces. A MWPC consists of many planes of parallel wires. They’re assembled in a chamber filled with a gas that ionizes when a charged particle flies by. The wire closest to the passing particle detects the event and a signal is read out. These arrays are arranged at right angles in tightly spaced pairs so it’s possible to calculate a position in two coordinates. As the particle passes through the chamber its x and y position is registered along its track. A computer calculates a trajectory for each particle and all of the particles that registered form a 3d image of the event. This information is then processed to reveal the physics of the event. This type of photography has become more sophisticated and MWPCs have largely been replaced by more capable detectors, but it's still the same idea - just a fancy camera. The people who use these exotic cameras use their smartphones like everyone else for all kinds of personal images.
Over the years I’d spent some time worrying about image and sound quality. At one point I thought better was - well - better. My epiphany came in the a perfectly restored 66 red Mustang. It was near Cleveland with the head recording engineer from Telarc Records and a seriously good musician from the Oberlin Conservatory. We were talking about where music reproduction might go with sound field reconstruction and dramatically more information than CDs could provide when a favorite Beatles tune came up on the 8 track (gasp! - it *was* an authentically restoration). The volume came up and the two of them were singing along to the music in pure delight. There is something transcendent about the music - even with awful reproduction in that noisy environment. Portable music players with cheap headphones would be good enough for most. As long as there's a personal touchstone.
Om points out there is a market for high end photography. Perhaps the real distinction is high end photography is more of a verb than a noun. You do it to learn how to see images as much as to capture them. Hopefully it will never go out of fashion.
Comments