Until they contemplate changing formats.
April 11, 2023
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Yes. But you tell me how you undo a worldwide myth. It would collapse social media empires!
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From my experience, that does not appear to be the case. Among MF photographers, there is often belief in magical properties of the format (in color, perspective, 3D pop, etc), and, sad to say, magical properties of CCD sensors. And don't get me started on the fictions (this time I mean deliberate, since those companies have smart engineers who could tell the marketing folks the truth) introduced by P1 and Hasselblad over the years.
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It's not easy. Ask Galileo.
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Ah, but he didn’t have social media!
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20 stops of dynamic range, that kind of thing?
I think I sort of understand the accidental myths. Medium format digital was 10x to 100x more expensive than most photographers would ever spend. Much like owning a Leica or old style Hassie, these products were aspirational dreams unlikely to ever be experienced personally. So it's easy to believe the myths must be true. Similar to enduring beliefs in high end audio. It cost 50k, it must be better, while the reality is often the complete opposite. Much high end gear is much worse than mass market cheap stuff with a lot of expensive but poor engineering. The CCD thing was true once, when cmos sensors were in their infancy and only suitable for doorbell cams. There is at least some sort of reason for believing CCD is better even if that belief has been obsoleted by the passage of time. And of course, people do like to revel in the idea that they are a member of an exclusive club that knows the real truth unlike like the rest of the sheeple. The miniformat medium format magic myth is odder though. I mean you can shoot a 35mm crop in many MF cameras. How come the magic disappears because of a small crop?
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Ask the other guy, the one that completed his appointment with the stake.
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"Aperture - "an opening, hole, orifice," from Latin apertura "an opening," from apertus, past participle of aperire "to open, uncover," from PIE compound ap-wer-yo- from ap- "off, away" (see apo-) + root *wer- "to cover." In optics, "the diameter of the exposed part of a telescope, microscope, etc.," from 1660s."
For a term established that early, why use an analogy?Aperture (or exposure for that matter) isn't one of those.
Short-legged analogies are among the first reasons why misconceptions flourish. IMO if an analogy can be avoided it better be.
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You’re a clever man and were probably fine as you were, but there’s lots of research to suggest that, for most people, a well chosen analogy supports learning.
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Text with emphasis
I don't agree about this example (obviously) but that doesn't matter and is why we should have the debate. And once all the ideas are out in the open the way to settle any disputes is not by arguing but by testing the alternatives on beginners. UX testing for photography.
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"A well chosen"
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Which is completely different from the teaching of photographic theory. Hurter and Driffield worked it all out at the end of the 19th century, and for another century that was what photographers learned and understood. It hasn't replaced by a better model. Instead, a load of Web influencers replaced it with a model which is internally inconsistent, doesn't fit the observed phenomena, has zero pedagogic advantage and clogs up the minds of learners. What I don't understand is why, when I learned photography, beginners could learn subversive things like what 'exposure' means, suddenly it's all too difficult for them now.
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I’m not going to agree or disagree with you at this point, especially as I know little of Web ‘influencers’. It was an impressive rant, though, and I would genuinely like to see you expand and explain your thinking. Is there another part of the site where this discussion might be better located?
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PhaseOne marketing + resellers = we have 16bit color raws ( ~15-20 years ago ) ...
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Ever thought that some people would object to having their thoughts characterised as a 'rant'?
Anyhow. This is the open talk area, so as good a place to discuss it as any.
So, Hurter and Driffield, in a series of papers published between 1876 and 1890, established one by one the the basic concepts on which photographic practice was subsequently based. These included the modern concept of exposure, the concept of emulsion 'speed', based on a systematic method of measuring the effect of light on film, the characteristic (also called the Hurter Driffield) curve, the idea of 'correct' exposure, based on a rigorous definition, along with 'under' and 'over' exposure. For a century this was the basis of what beginners were taught about photography. Of course, they didn't learn all the thinking, discussion and controversy behind the work, they just learned the outcomes - that exposure was the illumination at the plane of focus times exposure time. That it was controlled by scene luminance, f-number and exposure time, that 'correct exposure' was an exposure that placed the range of scene luminance on the linear region of the characteristic curve. Fast forward to today, when most of the teaching materials available on the web are teaching something completely different - and if you argue those simple basics of photography on a beginners question forum, you'll be subjected to borderline offensive posts accusing you of engaging in PhD level technicalities and having p***ing contests.
