Again, Reflections on Color and Light

Or, Reality is a Construction and that’s OK

Let’s wade right in. Here’s a digital photo more or less as it comes out of the camera:

That’s NOT what I saw, it’s what the camera ‘saw’, more or less. The camera shoots in so-called ‘raw’ mode, which contains more information than any monitor can display or than an printer can print. So some information has to be tossed out in the process of converting it to any one of a number of viewable formats. I chose jpg, and that’s ALL I did in creating that image. Photoshop ‘chose’ what information to toss.

Now, that image is VERY MUCH UNLIKE what I actually saw. The sky wasn’t that dark. It wasn’t dark at all. It was fairly bright, though not so bright as a high-noon sky on a bright day. I assume THAT’s what happens when you point the camera directly into a bright light source and the electronics has to cope with the dramatic difference between light directly from the source and light at the periphery. It damps down all over, but the source, that is, the sun, is so very bright that it’s still bright in the image while everything else is dark.

For the next two images I exercised some control over the raw-to-jpg conversion and, most of all, I did some manipulation in Photoshop:

The objects are much better defined. But in neither case does the color appear ‘natural’. The yellowish one is perhaps more natural, but that’s not saying much. Fact is, there’s so very little color information in these images that one doesn’t loose much by eliminating it:

That image may even appear more natural. On the one hand, grey scale images are (still) common enough that we recognize them as valid depictions. On the other hand, there’s no ‘unnatural’ color information to distract.

Autumn Leaves

Here’s a somewhat different image. I’m inclined to think that it is both more or less instantly recognizable and appears convincingly natural. But then, I knew what I was pointing the camera at when I took the shot.

At the same time I admit that the image is a little tricky. THAT’s what interests me. What’s tricky is the play of light and shadow, which, here and there, almost overwhelms the forms of the leaves and branches, creating visual forms on the image surface that do not correspond to the forms of solid objects ‘out there’ in the world.

Let me illustrate. Here’s a grey-scale realization of the image:

Except for a murky area at the left, the twigs and leaves are clearly visible through the play of light and shadow, though the sense of light coming though brightly lit leaves is much weaker here than in the color image.

Now, look what happens when I flatten the image by eliminating the continuous shading:

The sense of twigs of leaves is still there, most strongly in the upper center. But there are now many black, grey, and white forms that do not correspond to individual leaves or twigs. Consequently the sense of a world ‘out there’ has been severely attenuated. The eye-brain has to work much harder to make sense of the visual information, and some of it simply defies sense-making.

Visual Cues

What I’m doing, in effect, is playing around with the visual cues that eye-brain utilizes in constructing the visual world. I’ve started with an image that puts color forms in the image in tension with solid forms in the outside world that is depicted in that image. The basic conversion to grey-scale preserves that tension but the subsequent flattening increases it to the point where the perception of solid forms is compromised. The objects are broken.

All of which is to say that I’m pitting a so-called so-called secondary quality, color, against a so-called primary quality, shape, a distinction that looms large in Latour’s account of our misapprehension of the relations between nature and society (cf. Politics of Nature, pp. 47 ff.). I am able to do so precisely because I’ve got an ‘unnatural’ degree of control over the visual flux. The visual information is fixed to a plane. You can’t advance into it or withdraw from it, nor can you stick your hand out and move the twigs and leaves. You’re stuck with whatever I put on the plane.

And I can manipulate that so as to stress and confuse the eye-brain’s efforts to construct an external world. But under natural conditions, the eye-brain does very well. It is by no means perfect, but it IS very very good. Constructing artificial vision systems that match the performance of the eye-brain has so far proved elusive.

The World Abides

Here’s one last image, one where I’ve scrambled the color information:

When I first started working with Photoshop I spent a fair amount of time producing such images. It’s easy to do, it’s fun, and above all, it’s instructive. I did it for about a year and then I lost interest.

Why? Why’d I loose interest? I think it’s that, however interesting those images were as 2D compositions, the color play attenuated the sense of the objects in the image. In some cases the sense of objects was completely lost while in others, such as the above image, it was only attenuated. But, in the end, I’ve decided that, for me at least, the sense of real things out there in the world is central to taking photographs. That’s why I do it. It’s fun to create tension between the image forms and the objects, and it’s really fun to do that by putting the play of natural light against the forms—I DO like THAT a lot. But the objects must be there, pressing against the monitor, or the print, intruding themselves into our world.