Occasionally, photographers have combined their images with actual material from whatever they've been depicting - sand from the beach or even locks of hair. I thought it might be fun to try this with some of our sweetpeas.
So I took a conventional shot of the flowers, picked just after a rain shower. Then I printed and mounted the image. I then pressed several of the flowers and waited several weeks for them to dry out. Finally, I got some spray mount and stuck the pressed flowers on the mount.
I'm not sure if the hybrid image would be allowable in a photo competition, and I've not really learned how to press flowers well, but this is a picture of the finished result. An example, maybe, of photography's ability to capture beauty for all time, in a constantly changing world!
A nice idea Philip. It counts as a photo as you have included one. The pressed flowers could be considered an embellishment of the mount which is quite acceptable for a competition. I have pressed flowers in the past using a flower press - the best way. Try to dry them fairly quickly to preserve the colours. On a radiator for example 😤 Other ways you could try is pressing fresh flowers between sheets of glass and photographing them on a light box, or scanning on. a flatbed scanner
Thanks for the useful tips about pressing the flowers. I'm interested in trying to combine the relic of the original tangible object with the digital record of a moment of time. I suppose analogue photography, especially a daguerreotype, bears a much closer relationship to the subject of the photo than a digital image does, in terms of photons actually hitting the emulsion/copper, so it's all part of a quest to bring the digital image closer to 'reality' (as well as a chance to muse on transience!).
I enjoy musing myself, so how about this? A daguerreotype is no closer to reality than any other kind of photographic image. They all artefacts - new creations that did not exist before they were captured and processed into something we can appreciate.
What we ‘see’ anyway is an artefact too, not reality. It has been through many in-process transformations from the time electromagnetic waves of strictly limited wavelengths interact and reflect off a subject’s surface. When they reach the light receptors in our eyes, they spark off chemical reactions in the receptors which in turn generate electrical impulses. These pass up the optic nerves to the optical centre in our brains. By some miracle of physiology, here the information gets integrated into a construction that we call ‘seeing’. It’s a system that has evolved simply because it gives us an interpretation of reality that assists us to survive on this planet.
‘What is reality?’ is the wrong question. It’s something we will never know. Fortunately, nature has given us the means to get a great deal of enjoyment from our own personal translation of it.
I guess the physics and chemistry of analogue photography mean that, in one sense, at least, it is more real than digital photography. My understanding is that photographic film is physically altered by the light reflected from whatever is being photographed. The film usually comprises crystals of silver halide and if enough photons hit a given crystal quickly enough a latent image can be formed that can be later developed. In that sense there are direct physical and chemical links between the subject of the photograph and the developed image. By contrast, a digital image is always a digital construct, a set of binary numbers and algorithms (and the current exams fiasco demonstrates how potentially untrustworthy algorithms can be!).
As to whether our digital or analogue photos ever get close to reality, that, of course, is a different matter – and naturally it’s why I enclosed the word, reality, in quotation marks in my previous post. None of us knows quite how other people see the world around us. Though how and what we see can be affected by our culture and prevailing social trends. Before the late eighteenth-century, mountainous landscape was considered ‘ugly and offensive’, but our eyes were soon to be retrained to see them as things of wonder by such as William Wordsworth. There’s a forthcoming book, Spirit of Place, by Susan Owens, that I’m looking forward to reading. It sets out to explore ‘the way successive cultural, social and intellectual changes have shaped our attitudes to [landscape] over centuries’ and to get some purchase on how individuals saw the British landscape in times past. As photographers I think we can only try to convey something of how we see and feel, and hope that this resonates with our viewers.
Interesting comments Philip. Thank you. I’m not convinced that there is a fundamental difference between analogue and digital photography as regards closeness to ‘reality’. The output, if you like, of the process is the subjective experience of ‘seeing’ which is a phenomenon entirely in our heads and is essentially the same whether we are looking directly at the subject itself or at an image of it.
Even when we look directly at the subject, there are digital processes involved in the chain of transformations that occur between the light enter our eyes and the experience we have of seeing it. When photons of different energy levels fall on the photoreceptors in the retina, chemical changes take place that cause optic nerves to fire off impulses. This is an analogue process, but transmission along individual nerve fibres uses a binary code i.e. it is digital. The nerve transmits a very brief electrical spike called an action potential. The nerve is either transmitting a spike, or it isn’t - 1 or 0 in binary. The data is carried by frequency modulation of the spikes.
The nerve fibre divides into many fine branches at the far end which are in contact with the branches of other nerves. The contact is not physical though. There is a small gap between the terminal branches of one nerve and those of its neighbours. Passage of information from one nerve to the next in the chain is by diffusion of a chemical transmitter across the gap i.e. it is analogue.
So generation of what we are seeing depends on alternating analogue and digital methods of data transfer, and I have no idea how many times this happens, perhaps hundreds or thousands. This must happen in a very short space of time - and we think digital cameras are smart!
Thanks too for your interesting observations on landscapes, particularly about the dramatic cultural change in attitudes between the 18th and 19th centuries. However, I suspect any readership we have attracted on this forum might not have got this far, so I’ll leave it. For now.
An absolutely fascinating few items above Diddy and Philip! Thank you very much for these thoughts. And there was I thinking we just press a button on the camera!😃