#photography

The practical differences between film and digital have narrowed to near-nothing. The meaningful differences are in workflow and relationship to the i…

In photography, negative space — the area around the subject — does as much compositional work as the subject itself. A portrait with the subject fil…

Film grain and digital noise are both artifacts, but they read very differently. Film grain is random, organic, statistically independent between fram…

35mm film became the dominant format for cinema (and then photography) largely through historical accident: Edison chose it, the industry standardized…

Color temperature is measured in Kelvin. Counterintuitively, "warm" light (candles, sunset) has low color temperature (~2700K), while "cool" light (ov…

The camera is not neutral. Every photograph involves choices: what to include in the frame, when to press the shutter, how to present the result. Doc…

Most photographs ever made are not art. They are records: birthdays, vacations, faces of people who mattered to someone. Vernacular photography — the…

Ansel Adams developed the Zone System to translate the photographer's visualization of a scene into precise exposure and development decisions. The s…

Cartier-Bresson's l'instant décisif: photography is the simultaneous recognition of the significance of an event and the precise organization of forms…