Enterprise from Star Trek
Toronto. Trekkies everywhere will recognize this famous inter-galactic spaceship.
When the art of photography was announced in January, 1839, it too was revolutionary: Two different processes were announced – one in France; one in England. Both were monochromatic, dead slow, and very technical to use. One gave very contrasty, high resolution, one-off positive results (daguerreotype). The other was low contrast and low resolution but used a negative-positive system to make many prints from one negative (calotype or salted paper).
As time progressed, each generation tackled one issue: speed (faster lenses, faster media), motion (movies), dimensionality (stereo), colour, digital and now perhaps imagery defined by polarized light. Each generation added more converts as capturing a “good” image took less and less skill. With digital, we entered the paperless universe of the average amateur photographer retaining only a digital image using auto-everything cameras now in every smart-phone and uploading the image to social media.
My good friend (often participating at our fairs), Russ Forfar, operated Kominek’s camera repair here in the city for decades before recently fleeing to the bugs and blue skies of the Bruce peninsula. Russ sent me this fascinating article from Science Daily:
“Camera brings unseen world to light
“Portable polarization-sensitive camera could be used in machine vision, autonomous vehicles, security, atmospheric chemistry and more”.
Could this be “the next generation” of photography?
