Click, and its Forever

Taking pictures of the sunset tonight made me realize just how far you have come with photography, and to thank those early pioneers like Daguerre, Eastman and Muybridge for their discoveries. within 5 seconds i can turn on the camera point and click. and because its a digital camera i can review what i took with that same five seconds. I laugh as gruble at the blurryness of my fast shooting, after learning how earlier photo graphs had to expose for 10 minutes and the anxiousness of a babies would make the picture blurry. I think of photography as a way to preserve life. to remember a moment that can never be relived. film on the other hand can be a means to relieve something that has happened, or something that happened. One thing i love about photography is it can't be fiction, in the sense that what you take a image of must be there, even if it is constructed and not found naturally. (i'm talking about non-photo shopped images.) because of the nature of time in film, i think the artificial, both in plot and in the editing is more natural. for example in the melies films we saw , the "magic" effects he made by stopping and starting the filming made for some wonderful creations and the looks almost liek that could happen. if you never knew that it wasn't possible. i think we take for granted movies nowadays. while watching the some of the early moving pictures i wasn't that impressive, until you really think about it, and try to do it for yourself ( i hate flipbooks). i particularly loved the hand painted butterfly dancer - the effort that it must have taken is incredible to think about.

Before this class i knew about the early daguerreotypes, heard of Muybridge and his horse, but the context real implications were never there. I now feel like I will never look at a photo, film, or cartoon the same way again.