All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. - Richard Avedon - 1984
A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera ‘saw’ a piece of time and space. Garry Winogrand [i]
I am impressed with what happens when someone stays in the same place and you took the same picture over and over and it would be different, every single frame. Annie Leibovitz
Even if we diligently employ a camera to capture reality as faithfully as possible what we ourselves see, as photographers we cannot help but add a layer of interpretation by our choice of :
· perspective via viewpoint,
· tonality via exposure,
· focus and blur by aperture and shutter speed,
· distortion by choice of lens
· granularity by our choice of film or sensor sensitivity
· colour by our choice of white balance light temperature adjustment.
But even employing all options of current technology, we can never hope to capture what the human eye sees when viewing the same scene. Our eyes employ a variety of means including iris adjustment and chemistry to achieve an absolute dynamic range of around 20 to 24 f stops (Mc Mahon) [ii] when scanning a scene but a single glance, is more like 10-14 f-stops, which definitely surpasses most compact cameras (5-7 f stops), but is similar to that of digital SLR cameras (8-11 stops)[iii].The dynamic range of sensors used in digital photography is many times less than that of the human eye and generally not as wide as that of chemical photographic media[iv]. However even this has to be compressed in order for us to view an image i.e. The output dynamic range is reduced to 8-10 stops for computer screens, and 5-7 stops for print. In addition, the human eye also has a significantly more pixels than high end 24-megapixel cameras (Cicala)[v]. The eye of someone with 20/20 vision, can resolve the equivalent of a 52 megapixel camera (assuming a 60° angle of view). [vi] So what your eyes actually see in terms of tonal range and image quality is exponentially more than a camera could ever hope to capture or for you to see displayed on a screen or printed. So at best a DSLR generated photograph is a very poor copy of what we as humans can perceive from the reflected light in the world around us. We are just not able to capture in a photograph the same level of tonality, depth of field or sensitivity of what we can see with the naked eye.
Therefore absolute truth is a moving target; our ability to capture it even what we personally perceive as truth is limited by today’s technology. However a photographic record has the advantage over what we see in that it is an accurate and detailed record of an event recording a moment in time for posterity, unlike our memory of the same event which evolves or changes with time.
[i] http://www.focalpower.com/app/quote/subjects/1/ Feb 26th 2015
[ii]Mc Mahon R, http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/21579/how-does-the-dynamic-range-of-the-human-eye-compare-to-that-of-digital-cameras Retrieved Feb 26th 2015
[iii] http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/cameras-vs-human-eye.htm#angle-of-view Retrieved Feb 26th 2015
[iv] Wikipedia ,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range Retrieved Feb 26th 2015
[v] Cicala R, http://petapixel.com/2012/11/17/the-camera-versus-the-human-eye/ Retrieved Feb 26th 2015
[vi] http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/cameras-vs-human-eye.htm#angle-of-view Feb 26th 2015