Is it really photography. . . ?

<p>Is it really <em>photography</em> if there is no card in the camera?</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>Oh come on, Lannie. Make it more interesting. Say, for example:</p>

<p>Is it really <em>photography</em> if your battery is almost dead -- has only enough charge to record, 3/4, or 1/2, or 1/4, or 1/8 ... or 1/nth of the image?</p>

<p>Yes.</p>

<p>My camera has a memory that I can download the photo to the computer without the need of a card.</p>

<p>What if I "dry fire" a film camera so that the image is/was only seen by me through the viewfinder? Is/was that a photo? If so, then every image that I make with my eye is also a "photo": "When your heart keeps taking pictures that we'll share as years go by. . ."</p>

<p>Yet, if everything that registers on my retina is a photo, then the definition of "photograph" is so broad as to be meaningless.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<blockquote>

<p><em>"Yet, if everything that registers on my retina is a photo, then the definition of "photograph" is so broad as to be meaningless."</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>We have other terms to describe those things such as "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory">photographic memory</a>"; it's just a different kind of "photography" where the "memory card" is a biological mass made of neurons rather than an electronic equivalent made by SanDisk. </p>

<p>Wikipaedia tells us:<br>

The word "photography" was created from the <a title="Greek language" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language">Greek</a> roots φωτός (<em>phōtos</em>), genitive of φῶς (<em>phōs</em>), "light"<sup id="cite_ref-2" ><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography#cite_note-2">[2]</a></sup> and γραφή (<em>graphé</em>) "representation by means of lines" or "drawing",<sup id="cite_ref-3" ><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography#cite_note-3">[3]</a></sup> together meaning "drawing with light".<sup id="cite_ref-4" ><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography#cite_note-4">[4]</a></sup><br>

According to this, the answer to your question strictly speaking is "No!" If no recording takes place, you are effectively using a camera as a viewing device, just like a telescope or a pair of binoculars.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>We have other terms to describe those things such as "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">photographic memory</a>"; it's just a different kind of "photography" where the "memory card" is a biological mass made of neurons rather than an electronic equivalent made by SanDisk.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Michael, are you reading back into human memory an interpretive allusion to <em>publicly visible images</em> that came with the development of what we now call "photography"? If so, would not such an allusive usage be at best metaphorical? Yes, private images can persist in memory, but can memories be shared with others' <em>eyes</em>? With their imaginations, yes, but with their eye<strong>s</strong>. . . ? Was this not the great development of what we call "photography," that it, that it gave us a technology that allowed us to share with others an almost perfect facsimile of what we had actually <em>seen</em>?</p>

<p>What makes photography "photography" after all? If I see something, that is one thing. If I take a photo of what I see, that is something else entirely. "It was a great view, but I missed the shot. By the time I got the camera out, the light had changed." (I just missed one minutes ago.) The image is still in my memory, but I didn't get the <em>photo.</em><br /> <br /> --Lannie</p>

<blockquote>

<p>If no recording takes place, you are effectively using a camera as a viewing device, just like a telescope or a pair of binoculars.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Exactly, David--just as one is viewing with the naked eye, for that matter.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>On the other hand, David, as long as the image shows on the back of my camera,<em> it endures long enough for others to see it,</em> even if there is no card in the camera.</p>

<p>Sure, the image on the rear screen is ephemeral, but "ephemeral" is a matter of degree. Even the print is, in the great expanse of time, rather ephemeral.</p>

<p>So, yes, what I take with no card in the camera is yet a photo, provided that the image persisted long enough to be seen by the eyes of others.</p>

<p>Try selling that image, though. . . .</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>So. . . I would offer the tentative definition of a photo as a image that one captures that endures long enough to be shared with the eyes of others. This would not extend to seeing something that someone else sees at exactly the same time, since the two perspectives are not quite identical.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>Is there a "Philosophy of Photography Forum" if no one posts there?</p>

<p>In an unrelated thought; I can't imagine what made me think it:<br /> When a room in an ancient pueblo was cut off from outside light and air, it was simply filled up with rubbish and walled off.</p>

<p>;-)</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Is there a "Philosophy of Photography Forum" if no one posts there?</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>JDM, George Lord Berkeley would be pleased.</p>

<p>Now, if threads on this forum are finally deleted from the PN server, did they ever officially exist? (They never appear on the front page of the site.)</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Is it really <em>photography</em> if there is no card in the camera? </p>

</blockquote>

<p>What's the difference between it being "really <em>photography</em>" and "<em>photography"</em>?</p>

<blockquote>

<p>just as one is viewing with the naked eye, for that matter. </p>

</blockquote>

<p>Picking up my camera, taking it out to shoot pictures, looking through the lens, and pressing the shutter could be considered an act of photography without resulting in a photo. It's different from seeing with the naked eye.<br>

<br>

Photography is an activity. I don't know that it always requires a particular result.</p>

<p>It might be a great zen-like photographic practice to purposely or accidentally leave your film behind when going out with a camera. Because then you could come home and ask "how many pictures did I not take?" And you could even do that without a camera, thereby giving your walk a context.<br>

<br>

The meaning of life is often just spin anyway. ;-)</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Photography is an activity. I don't know that it always requires a particular result.</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>Fred, sometimes I just walk around with two hands in front of my eye, making a little squarish frame and abstracting from the world. Photography?</p>

<blockquote>

<p>It might be a great zen-like photographic practice to purposely or accidentally leave your film behind when going out with a camera. Because then you could come home and ask "how many pictures did I not take?"</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p><strong>!</strong></p>

<p>Best post of all time on Photo.net, Fred. . .</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p> </p>

<blockquote>

<p>Oh come on, Lannie. Make it more interesting. Say, for example:<br /> Is it really <em>photography</em> if your battery is almost dead -- has only enough charge to record, 3/4, or 1/2, or 1/4, or 1/8 ... or 1/nth of the image?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Make it more interesting, Julie. Say, for example:</p>

<p>If I wander into your shower while out on one of Fred's zen-like ramblings, did I catch a nude or not?</p>

<p>I could, of course, claim that I didn't look, and so no photograph was ever made.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>In my mind<br>

a perfect sword cut<br>

the subject falls<br>

bisected<br>

but walks away<br>

intact</p>

 

<p>Still trying to imagine <em>the photo not taken</em>, this one of my ex-wife. . . .</p>

<p>And she walked away intact, Sandy.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p><div></div>

<p>You are lucky that your camera shows an image, mine simply says something like "Insert card" (The camera is attempting to answer the OP). If a camera with live view allows an image, it is more often than not one that is changing with time and perhaps you can say you have an ephemeral videograph. What that we observe isn't ephemeral, Lannie?</p>

<p>Last night, two island friends allowed me entrance into two of our older churches on the island where I wanted to photograph evidence of former presences, in one case the cross markings on top of a stone alter made when Monseigneur Pontbriand came from France to consecrate the new (the second) church in 1749, and the other, ten years later in another village church that had been temporarily turned into hospital where a soldier David Chapman of Her Majesty's ship Neptune inscribed on the stone walls his calling card and date. In each case, my attempts with an angled flashlight to record these images mainly aborted. What I saw was too poorly recorded. Were they photographs? Of course, I can always go back better prepared. Can my act of photographing without palatable results still result in photographs?<br>

</p>

<blockquote>

<p>If a camera with live view allows an image, it is more often than not one that is changing with time and perhaps you can say you have an ephemeral videograph.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Arthur,<em> et al.</em>, you are <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley">blowing my mind</a> </em>this morning.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>Lannie, without wanting to interpret your feelings, your image of ex-wife smiling can be taken in another sense as a good visual definition of nostalgia. That is something I sometimes feel for past times, often appreciated, but now history, or other cases where I feel nostalgia as I might have taken a different path in my rather simple life but did not. What remains is a sentiment without a continual link to subject. Both white and black evoke I think the same distance from the event, and possibly nostalgia. But what chapter in a text cannot provide an equally informative succeeding one? </p>

<p>For some reason, what you are saying, Arthur, evokes in me a memory of the words of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLsDxvAErTU">Paul Simon's<em> "Kodachrome"</em></a>: "everything looks worse in black and white."</p>

<p>I thus interpret the song to mean that "Kodachrome" is imagination/fantasy, but "black and white" is reality. Therefore, "everything looks worse in black and white" really means that the speaker (in the lyrics) is saying that he prefers imagination/fantasy to reality.</p>

<p>By extension, nostalgia can also be preferable to reality as well--or is that a false dilemma?</p>

<p>"The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." -- William Faulkner.</p>

<p>If you took all the girls I knew<br />When I was single<br />And brought them all together for one night<br />I know they'd never match<br />My sweet imagination<br />Everything looks worse in black and white. -- Paul Simon</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>Sometimes one does not have to imagine: the photo was indeed taken, and there <em>was </em>film or a card in the camera.</p>

<p>(Now <em>that</em> is a photograph!)</p>

<p>--Lannie</p><div></div>

<p><a href="https://fstoppers.com/portraits/paying-more-attention-shooting-without-looking-through-viewfinder-2717">LINK</a></p>

<p>nm</p>

<p>Is thinking and talking about photographs not taken, or not taken yet, photography?<br>

I would tend to say: yes it is. <br>

One can think, create, talk and write about photographs that do not exist and never will.</p>