The Digital Bonus

Digital images have a potential I am only now realizing. 

I procured my first digital camera because I didn't want to spend a fortune developing rolls of film. I came back with 60 Kodak rolls when I visited the Philippines the first time in the mid-1980s. I threw the bag of films in my closet and forgot all about them when I got home. 

My first camera, a Sony digital, that saved files to an Apple floppy disk, re-ignited my interest in photography that my first SLR camera, a Minolta, began. Not only could I shoot as many pictures as I wanted but tilting the camera just so changed the angle of the light coming into the sensor. Photography became exciting again.

Three Canon SLRs later I am discovering what images comprised solely on bits, of digital information, are about. I'd read how art was imitation of life but imitation that was more true of the experience than reality. I just never knew why writer and artists made this claim. The truth about a subject, a person, a place or a situation is not what meets the eye at first glance. To see as an artist sees is to use other mental faculties than just the retina and vision center of the occiput!
I lent Arron my first Canon camera so he has a good camera for the photography class I had encouraged him to take. He brought it back at our last shoot. The camera was not reading Compact Flash card correctly. The images captured by the camera were being dislocated with resulting images that were surreal. Body parts were not where they were supposed to be nor were the colors correctly situated either. The images were phantasmagoric. 

When I looked at those images again this morning, my eyes were miraculously opened. I saw and what wonders there were in colors and the unimaginably new ways they interacted with shapes and total design!