Optical Simulacra, Changing Perspectives

Finally.

Getting the spare time to write has been generally pretty challenging. Work itself generally eats up my entire weekend, but I actually got out early today.

Working third shift and permanently detonating my sleep schedule has given me a bizzare perspective. I'm one of those people who tends to go on really, really long walks to get some exercise and reset myself, and doing it at three in the morning adds onto the weirdness. Put simply, the world just isn't designed to operate at night.

However, in that silence there are still things that reveal themselves. As an example, I rather like the night sky, what little of it can be seen from my neck of the woods. For a long time, I wished to do astrophotography.

Modern phone cameras are... interesting. I happen to have a Google Pixel 6 as my daily driver, and overall the phone has treated me well as... my phone. Very rarely do I take pictures with it, because the camera is oft an added bonus, not my make-or-break feature. This being said, of course the first thing I do with it is take some pictures of various things, including but not limited to, cats, flowers, and autumn leaves.

Having had the phone for a bit and being up at ohgodthirty, I elected to take one of my walks. The route is pretty contrived, but it passes near a couple of cell phone towers. So as I pass by one, I take a picture of it flashing, in the ever-lasting silence of the night. After I let the phone do the long exposure, I review the image. I will not be posting the image for various reasons, but overall: the night sky glistens with the stars in the sky, the tower glows with the bright red of its beacons, and I have this... godawful feeling mixed with awe.

The fact that I can take pictures at night isn't what bothers me... I guess it's more that the image feels phony. I, with the convenience of modern processing, have just taken a picture that probably was barely possible with the mobile hardware, 5-10 years ago.

Allow me to explain.

When looking at a real, modern camera™, there are several components absolutely necessary to take an image. First, you have your camera sensor, generally comprised of tiny capacitors (if you're stuck in CCD land), or tiny photodiodes and transistors, and you have your lens. The lens is the major thing here, because for me this is why this image feels fake: A phone essentially has to emulate, with the best of its ability, a full optical assembly. This can only realistically be done with a lens stack in tandem with software processing, and whilst raw images are possible at 1x from certain anecdotes, it appears that the Pixel 6 itself tends to overprocess anything beyond that. Which is... frankly kind of an issue when you're using supposedly one of the best cameras on the market. I will take this opportunity to say that it's not innately a 'bad camera'-- Moreso that the processing is definitely present, and I've noticed it more the more images I've shot with it.

So already, an SLR camera is a simulacrum of an optic nerve, but adding layers ontop, we have a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Yes, this conjunction of words feels like utter nonsense (especially because, despite the fact that I have indeed read Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, he thought people were taking the orders too seriously so it's difficult to take the source text too seriously as a result of that), but it's given me a lot to think about. In a sense, it seemed a lot like everything around me was stained the same color-- That everything around me was fake and ephemeral; We already live in a world where LLMs have poisoned practically everything, and 'AI art' models (GANs?) have finally started making perceptible images, at the cost of being really shitty to artists trying to make a living... as a result of that, this feeling didn't go away, literally at all.

So naturally, I dug up a film camera from my late stepfather's things, and am being lent a DSLR. At first I just had the film camera with some Ilford HP5+, but the digital camera came into being when I realized how completely unforgiving film is to learn on, which I actually like and am still using it for. But I can refine my skill more if I have, frankly, a cheaper method of learning. Enter: The Nikon D60. It isn't full frame, but I don't mind at all. As you can see down below, with the image of the cat, it takes a pretty decent picture still!

Some people like the convenience of the modern smartphone, and that's totally OK, but I think I'll take the D60 around with me for awhile, and take some pictures that, at the least, feel just that tiny bit more real. Even if there's a little bit more effort involved.