P3D Re: Holga vs Hassy for instance

["David W. Kesner" <drdave@xxxxxxxxxx>]

In P3D digest 3445 John Roberts says:

> If you pose your cousin Seymour in a Nathaniel Hawthorne costume in front
> of Mt. Rushmore, and use a fill flash with red cellophane in front, and a
> star filter on the camera lens, and deliberately tilt the camera 17
> degrees clockwise, then what parts of this process are the art, and what
> parts are the photography? (In other words, to what extent is this a
> useful distinction?)
> 
> I suspect that unless the subject is something like passport photos, it's
> very hard to isolate the art from the photography.

Actually this is very easy to answer. It is all photography as you are 
simply capturing an image. Anyone could push the button on the 
camera and record the same identical image. Yes, you have made 
individual choices that have created a unique image, but they could 
all be very easily duplicated by anyone to produce an identical 
image.

With art, there is no way to exactly reproduce a brush stroke or 
curve of clay. Yes, there are those who can make very good 
forgeries that all but the best could never tell from the original, but 
they can be detected by experts.


> So where on the superior-inferior scale is the primary mirror of the
> Hubble Space Telescope? Its construction is horribly inaccurate, and
> it produces terrible distortion, but it's so phenomenally precise that
> near-perfect compensation (in the rest of the system optics) has been
> possible.

Once again very easy to answer. A Hubble Space Telescope with a 
primary mirror that is accurate and free from distortion is far 
superior. This is like asking if the lens of a Busch Verascope is 
made more superior because the inside of the camera is painted 
black to compensate for the lens flaring.

That's all for now,

David W. Kesner
Boise, Idaho, USA
drdave@xxxxxxxxxx


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