Book Review #4

Cover of Carl Sagain's The Demon-Haunted World which you can find here.

I put up a lot of my photography on this blog. You see the images and the story, but I rarely ever talk about the science behind photography. This is why the book review if this week is a book by Carl Sagan. He is a reminder to me to pay attention to the science behind things I take for granted, things I don't understand, the things that could potentially cause fear.

Images are everywhere, and with digital cameras anyone can be a photographer and throw a picture onto the internet. The same can be done with film. An image can be scanned, become a digital file and then there you go, it is also on the internet. What you see are mainly film images that I scan, but there is much more behind that than stories of pictures.

There is a science in understanding how an aperture works, deciding what shutter speed to use based on daylight and wanted sharpness of an image. There is science in the chemicals used to make, develop, and print film. In a darkroom, I always feel more like a mad scientist than I do an artist as light hits paper and shades come to life in developing fluids.

I am leaving a lot of details out. To be fair, it would take me quite a while to talk about every scientific detail I would like. So I thought it would be better to leave it like this and perhaps sound intriguing enough to some one who will pick up a camera, a book, and some black and white film.

This image and others were made from film on photographic paper. Mad scientists, unite!