Photography is Too Frickin’ Cool
By Brian Auer • March 9th, 2007I’m a mechanical engineer, so naturally I’m a fan of the Dilbert comic. I’m also a big fan of The Dilbert Blog by Scott Adams. A few days ago, Scott wrote a post titled “Too Frickin’ Cool” that asks readers to describe some technology that is so futuristic you can hardly believe that you are using it. So as a photographer, my response to that is digital photography.
Photography alone is too frickin’ cool — regardless of whether it’s digital or film. You point your camera at something, push a button, and capture a slice of the past. That moment you captured represents some small amount of time in the past; a moment that will never return and can’t be duplicated. But with that photograph, you can revisit that moment and see into the past. You can share that moment with others who weren’t there at the time and instantly transport them to that time and location. So really, it’s the closest thing we have to time travel and teleportation.
Now queue digital photography. The photograph you take is created by a small piece of silicon semiconductor that contains millions of receptor locations that transform photons of light into electrons, which then are converted to voltage and translated into binary data. That data is evaluated, transformed, and compressed by a tiny little computer residing inside the camera and powered by something that fits in the palm of your hand. That data is then stored in an array of floating gate transistors with a physical footprint smaller than you could see with the naked eye. The amazing thing is that this all happens is a split second. You can then transfer/duplicate that data to other storage devices, manipulate that data, and even transfer that tiny little block of binary code onto a large piece of paper worthy of hanging on your wall to be admired by others.
So what’s frickin’ cooler than that, huh?
Photo of the Day…
Photo by Brian Auer
03/05/07 Neuchatel, Switzerland
Swiss Alps Beyond Lake Neuchatel
Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D
Konica Minolta AF DT 18-200
300mm equiv * f/6.7 * 1/350s * ISO100
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from San Diego, California. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
Visit the author's homepage | View all Epic Edits posts by Brian Auer
Photography, and Digital Photography especially, is cool indeed. I think, that Internet is the coolest thing though - transferring all these bits of information, posting photos on the net for everyone to look at, writing about them, and much more.
How did we live without internet before?
I know it, the Internet is truly amazing. It’s really becoming something. I read a great article in Wired magazine in 2005 called “We Are The Web” that talks about the Internet in 1995, 2005, and 2015. Super cool article — a must read. It talks about the web as it’s evolving into a world-spanning consciousness — the machine that encapsulates all human knowledge… eventually. I kept the hard copy of the magazine so I could read it again in 2015 to see how good their predictions were.
Thanks for that article, Brian. It inspired me to write today’s post on my blog
You managed to explain it terms that I never really thought about before. Thanks
What can I say, we engineers are a strange bunch.