Technically Speaking

Shooting color used to be simple: you just dialed in your white balance and fired away. Excepting the rare cases where the colors had to be spot on (such as in fashion photography), this straightforward approach was close enough for most types of photography.

Imagine a camera you could plunk down in front of the Taj Mahal or anywhere else and snap photos that were indistinguishable from reality. A camera producing images that, when properly displayed, would be pictorially the same as being there.

Mark was a fellow radio astronomer, full of insights. One day in a conversation about photography he said something that caused my eyebrows to lift: “Well, as we all know, color film is never sharp.” But what Mark was getting at was this: As the consequence of a few million years of Darwinian evolution, our eyes have three types of color receptors, casually described as red, green, and blue.

Remember when Paul Simon crooned, “Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away”? That classic film may have given you nice bright colors, but only on sunny days. In its early incarnations, Kodachrome’s film speed—its sensitivity—was 10, or slower than Homer Simpson.

We’ve all seen them: night shots of some wind-weathered rock formation in the American Southwest, backed by a dramatic, star-spangled sky. Earth, the universe, and everything.
Your first thought: “What sort of unaffordable equipment does it take to make a photo like that?” Your second thought: “You know, a 16x20 nighttime pic would sure look good above the pool table.”