This weblog post is the eleventh in a series about optics. It is about collecting digital photographs.
I have an interest in photographs, but prefer not to retreat to 19th and 20th century technologies. If I am going to look at an image, I want it to be in a digital format so that it can be seen on a laptop screen or other computer monitor. Yes, many of these are reproductions of analogue photographs, often originally made on glass plates or film, that subsequently have been digitized.
My photographic collection is alphabetically organized by the name of the photographer, with birth and death dates, if known. This collection includes the works of over 2 100 photographers, each represented with from 1 to almost 1 000 works. Commonly, the number of photographs for any given photographer is < 10. In addition, I have a few topical folders that temporarily contain works that are uncatalogued.
Apart from my own photographs, that I share freely with others, I do not own these works. None of the photographs in my collection were purchased. They were not acquired as or have status as an investment. A few have personal significance. More have historical significance. Some even have artistic merit. Most are in my collection for one simple reason: I like them!
The first photographic images were made by Johann Heinrich Schulze (1687 – 1744) using silver nitrate (AgNO3) in 1717. However, he not only incorrectly thought that the image was produced by heat, rather than light, he did not find any way to fix = make permanent the resulting image. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765 – 1833) succeeded at this in about 1822 – 1827. His first photograph is shown below. It is about 200 years old, and is an example of a photograph of historical significance, I do not find it enjoyable. It is not beautiful.. It only has technological merit.
At times, I have read about other historic photographic techniques, and have an appreciation of how they worked. These include: daguerreotype, invented in 1833 by Louis Daguerre (1787 – 1851); ambrotype, invented in 1848 by Frederick Scott Archer (1813 – 1857); tintype = melanotype = ferrotype, a photographic technique that creates a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal, coated with a dark lacquer/ enamel that supports a photographic emulsion. It was introduced in 1853 by Adolphe Alexandre Martin (1824 – 1896).
In an earlier weblog post, I have written about Ello, my favourite social media. Some of my photography collection has its origins there, for various reasons. Here is an example by user Rhinoceros = Andrew Sommerfelt. This was the last image I was able to acquire from the site before it disappeared. I always appreciated Andrew’s photos because they were of places I had visited in my childhood and youth, near Vancouver.
At various times in my life, I have wondered if a career as a cinéma camera operator would have suited my personality. I have made one attempt at an amateur video production.
Many of the photographs I collect are about technology, and technology changes during my lifetime. The photo below is part of an advertisement for Logitech, and its Keys-to-Go keyboards. The person in the official photo is referred to as a surfer. I refer to this 95% naked person as Miss Click Bait. Yes, I own a red Keys-to-Go Nordic keyboard, that is unused, and dates from 2015. It claims to work with: iPad, iPhone and Apple TV. Miss Click Bait can be regarded as occupying 38 mm (width at shoulders) by 123 (length of body in photo) = 4674 mm2. The object being advertised, the Keys-to-Go keyboard occupies 20 x 10 mm of space = 200 mm2, compared to the total space of 393 x 340 = 133 280 mm2. It occupies 1/666.4 of the total area, and about 1/23 of Miss Click Bait’s area. Despite the discrepancy in size, I am convinced (without any quantitative proof) that this photograph accomplishes its primary aim, of convincing males to buy the keyboard. Despite this, I purchased mine before of being aware of this photograph.
The rest of this post is dedicated to my own photos taken on a walk in Mosvik, across the bridge from where we live, on Thursday 2026-04-16. We walked up to Furufjellet = The Pine Mountain. Here are the photos in chronological order, with comments about content.
Some people have better control over their environment than I do. At about 18:15, Trish noticed a vessel motoring north, about to enter Skarnsund. She wanted to know if it was a commercial fishing boat. So she went into marinetraffic.com. She has this website set up on her computer, so that she sees what is in front of our house. The vessel was no longer a fishing boat, although it had been. It was now being used as a pleasure vessel. It was 64 feet long and 18 feet wide. It was heading to its home port at Kjerknesvågen, on the far side of Skarnsund, but still in Inderøy.
I had considered taking a photo of the vessel, but it was travelling so fast, that it was out of view before I managed to find my HHD.
This post was devised on 2025-01-06 and scheduled for 2025-03-01 on 2025-01-07.
