If you squint you can see Dick Feagler in this image. Really. Okay, not really.
One day a while back, I dragged a digital camera’s raw file into a word processing program. Yeah, yeah, I know… No, I don’t know why I did this…
First, I was surprised that the 8.2 MB photo actually opened in the simple Text Edit program. The “image” was displayed not in shadows and highlights and colors, but in characters. I pressed the down arrow on my keyboard, scanning through the seemingly endless string of letters, numbers and symbols, and noticed that the scroll bar on the side of the window was barely moving. I depressed “page down” and the scroll bar barely sped up, but the characters kept flying by. This was a huge text document, and I felt like I was peering into the eyes of a digital beast.
This was about as hard-core as digital photography could be. I’ve groaned about having to understand what the histogram means. I’ve moaned as I labored while creating a clipping path in Photoshop. And I’m not the only one suffering: I sent a link to a colleague, the topic being archiving our digital images. It discussed saving native raw files as .DNG files, embedding .xmp side cars, verification of copies by implication, migration to optical media, and double dng-only workflow, among other asset management considerations. Apparently the “boom” I heard a few minutes later was my friend’s head exploding all the way out in Massachusetts. Now, I’m not sure I want to comprehend how all this information translates into a photo.
I imagine that if I printed the pages of characters, taped it together and stood way far back, I could see a photograph. I tried selecting some of the characters and told the computer to speak them. It sounded like a radio station ID at the top of the hour, in Cantonese and Pig Latin combined. continued …
