I calved this blog off from my other blog craftofcoding.wordpress.com, because I really felt that it was the right time to have a blog dedicated to the craft of visual imagery. I have worked in image processing for many years, but more in the throes of academia, and never in a fulfilling manner. I have always had an interest in photography, and dabbled in film photography while at university during the 80’s. But film processing got too expensive, and it just didn’t feel like the right medium for me. I abandoned taking analog photographs and instead turned to image processing, when the only really digital media was scanned images. With the advent of digital cameras, I returned to photography, mainly due to the simplicity in obtaining photographs – there was no need to wait to see how a picture had turned out, it was instantaneous. I bought my first digital camera in 2002, a 2MP Olympus point-and-shoot.

The past 20 years have seen vast improvements in digital capture technology, photographs with incredible resolution, precision optics, super-fast autofocus etc. But something was still missing. There was something about the character of analog photographs that just can’t be replicated in digital. Some might relate this to their aesthetically appealing aberrations. Why were Instagram filters so popular? Why were people adding the same sort of image defects we were always trying to remove in image processing? What’s the dal with bokeh? Then the ah-ha moment, when the two worlds of analog and digital collide.

Last year I bought a Voigtländer 25mm manual focus prime lens for my M43 Olympus EM5(ii). After so many years of auto-everything, you tend to forget about the photographic skills you learn doing things manually, like focusing. Therein I decided to move the clock backwards and integrate the use of vintage lenses with my digital cameras. There was also a part of me that was beginning to wonder whether many image processing tasks I had spent years exploring had any intrinsic value. Instead I decided to move down another path, and view image processing from a more aesthetic viewpoint.

This blog will explore the history of vintage lenses, their integration with digital cameras, basic image processing techniques, and aspects of digital photography. It will also look at some of the more esoteric aspects of the visual world, like the cameras perspective of the human eye.