brainstorms

Friday December 31, 2004

sir arthur's note, sea-eat blog etc...

• Sir Arthur C Clarke's updated message from Sri Lanka.
• The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog

this will be a difficult new year.

(2004-12-31 18:41:57.0) Permalink Comments [0]

new photography and the problem of authentication

here is an image i made two years ago: an interior shot of the inimitable suleymaniye mosque in istanbul. i occasionally sell limited edition prints, and there is something i can say about this image with great certainty:

i made this image.

i could prove this assertion if needed; i actually have the physical slide at hand. [it is in a sequence of other physical slides showing related interior shots, all frame-numbered] this gives me the kind of authentication power that is harder to match in the digital photography realm: the correspondence between the imaging equipment, the original image and its photographer is very weak (circumstantial) or nonexistent. for cameras that produce pre-processed images, there is no way to directly prove ownership. this is less of a problem for prosumer DSLRs that produce raw images, provided that the original raw image is never shared. (i am assuming the process of going from raw to, say tiff is nearly impossible to reverse, because of antialiasing, scaling etc).

related links: adobe's digital negative (dng) proposal.

(2004-12-31 11:08:19.0) Permalink