WGPC – Electronics versus Mechanics and the Battle for Colour

When any of us use our cameras—whether traditional cameras or mobile devices—we naturally think of them as electronic tools. It’s easy to forget that cameras existed long before electronics. Early cameras were purely mechanical objects, often made of wood and polished brass, and were works of art in their own right.

Everything about photography was manual. Exposure settings were calculated by hand, picture-taking could be a physical task, and the cameras themselves were heavy and unwieldy. The whole process was slow: you didn’t see the results of your efforts until much later, after significant time and expense. Imagine the disappointment of discovering your careful calculations were wrong. To increase the chances of success, photographers bracketed exposures—at further cost in what was already an expensive pastime.

Even many analogue film cameras that are still in use today (and, remarkably, some still being manufactured) are in fact electronic devices. Autofocus, exposure metering, exposure calculation, and often shutter control all rely on electronics.

With the shift to digital photography came another major change: digital image processing. The wet darkroom largely disappeared, becoming the domain of specialists and, as we’ve seen in recent weeks, producers of high-value output.

The enthusiastic adoption of electronics has not been universal. There is a strong market for retro-styled cameras with mechanical dials and switches, and even for cameras offering fully mechanical control of shutter speed and aperture. Alongside this, many photographers resist the digital darkroom, preferring Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC) images.

But even SOOC images are not untouched. Every digital image has already been processed—sharpened, contrasted, colour-balanced—according to what the camera’s software believes is “best”. Colour, in particular, is the result of extraordinary digital computation. It’s actually remarkable that colour photographs resemble the scene in front of us at all.

Often they don’t. Cameras assume the light in front of them is average, when in reality it is frequently unusual lighting that prompted us to take the photograph in the first place. Look through our club folder and you’ll find many sunrise, sunset, and moon images. Have you ever stopped to consider how close those colours are to what you actually saw?

You might think this issue disappears in black and white photography—but it doesn’t. The tones in our monochrome images are strongly influenced by the colour information that is first captured and interpreted before conversion to black and white.

Calling this “false colour” is probably unfair. Modern cameras get it right most of the time. But there are occasions when you may want to take back control for creative reasons.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be writing about colour temperature and tint, and how adjusting them can dramatically change the quality and mood of our photographs. To do that, we first need to step back and ask a fundamental question: what is colour? And how do we perceive it on screens, in print, and in the real world?

One thing we will quickly discover is that there is no such thing as a single, standard colour.