Databending & Glitch + Image file formats

This weeks class was all about digital photography.

In contrast to analogue photographs, digital photography isn’t a printed picture, but it is a photograph or a series of photographs that appear on a screen. But, essentially digital photography is a lot more than that, it is a series of symbols and numbers, codes coming from the computer to the screen to place things at the right spot.  Thus, in digital photography, these codes replace the films that were used in analogue photography.  BUT one has to bear in mind, that the digital can never fully replicate the analogue version, in digital photography there is no such thing as a 100% replication. 

Moreover, there are a lot of different file types for digital images, and they all have there own variations on coding. Image files can be quite large sometimes and larger files basically mean more  disk space usage. 

Another thing that should be taken into account when talking about the many different file types is the number of different colours that an image contains, for instance, if an image has few colours a file type can be designed to exploit this as a way of reducing file size. 
Different image file formats include JPEG, RAW or TIFF whereas JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is by far the most common file format, because it uses lossy compression and thus enables us to compress data to be smaller than in the actual file. 

Talking about colours, one should also refer to the term 'bits of colours', meaning that in terms of colour we're only allowed a certain colours and a certain amount of  bits to represent those colours. 

Images in black and white, for instance, might only need one bit to represent each pixel, whereas more colourful images need far more, to create a clear representation. 

The more bits we're allowed to use, the better/clearer the picture becomes. 

Additionally, there is a number of other terms that we should pay attention to when referring to digital photography. Compression, for instance, is used to describe terms of cutting the size or squash down files. 

Different compression schemes can be lossy or lossless. 

Lossy would be the fact of loosing data through the compression process, whereas lossless means that there is no loss of data during compression. 

Databending (=manipulation) and glitch( (=corrupting data) are often related to digital photography and have been used by numerous artists and photographers to create very exceptional works of art that often rise questions of ownership. 

The german photographer Michael Wolf, for instance, captured the good and not so lovely aspects of life in cities.  He photographed commuters with their faces compressed against windows, meaning that he took pictures of strangers, which rises the question if he is allowed to photograph strangers without their permission. 

When talking about author - and ownership, one question comes up that is particularly interesting for the 'online generation' nowadays: What about the sharing and posting of pictures online and on social networks? A thing that most people a not aware of, is the fact that as soon as you post a picture on Facebook, it actually belongs to Facebook and this generally means that they are allowed to do with it what they want. The picture you posted three years ago of you and your friend in your bikinis on the beach could be used as an ad for a sex shop in Tokyo, shocking, isn't it? 

But I think that the issue of ownership and the controversial questions and discussions that it raises, are part of what makes photography so interesting! It isn't only about taking a picture and editing it. There are so many things and issues to take into account when posting, editing or sharing a picture!

As we're going to see in another post in more detail, in his article Culture of Connectivity, Jose van Dijk analyses this process of sharing pictures. By taking the example of the social platform Flickr, he tries to understand the reasons as well as the consequences of sharing pictures online, and thus he concludes by saying that :'The word ‘sharing’, much like the term ‘collective’, appears to be uncritically transposed from a context defined primarily by social interaction to an environment largely defined by digital platforms.'  Thus, one could say that often people aren't aware of the fact that 'sharing' in the digital world has a somewhat different meaning than it has in the real world, partly also because the internet is infinite and we can't really control who we are actually sharing our pictures with.

Reading: 

Jose van Dijk - Culture of Connectivity