Just about finished reading my Christmas gift copy of David Hockney's Secret Knowledge
Hockney, as you probbaly know, is a famous artist and painter known for using everything from xerox machines to actual oil paints. He's interested in visual phenomenon and how we see as it relates to art. (He made an interesting video a few years back comparing Canaleeto's almost photographic paintings of Venice Italy with Chinese scroll painters who didn't bother to use single point perspective.) Anyway, this relates to us here because this book's premise is that what we think of the Rennaisance Masters almost all used some form of optics. In about 1430 he says the northern painters began using concave mirrors to project images onto canvas. Later around 1600 the great painters began using camera obscuras with lenses projecting upside down mirror reveresed images on to their canvases. He points out that at this time all the wine glasses once held in right hands in paintings were now in left hands. With the development of better flat mirrors they were able to reflect the lens image once to correct this. (looking through our view cameras we see things upside down, but not mirror reversed. If we were to project the image onto a white card we would see it reversed as well as upside down). Because I have a background in both art history and photography I'm amazed that it's taken this long to clearly sum up the use of optics in painting. Much more work needs to be done and Hockney says almost nothing about focal lengths and what actual lenses were available and that exist in museums. For us here I think it relates directly to the interest in pinhole cameras. I've been taping onto the front of my viewcamera everything from marbles, to glass balls to magnifying glasses. I'm sure that's what the Rennaisance painters did--tried everything. Many of these objects actually form images that could be used for photographs. (A Magnifying glass 3" in diameter made a funky image. placing a piece of black mat board with a 3/4" hold behind the flat side of the glass gave me a smaller f-stop and a better image. I predict that there will be a demand by artists for lenses and camera obscuras. There's probably money in it for some enterprising person. I'm just worried that the painters are going to go out and buy up all the neat surplus lenses. ---William Nettles [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nettles Photo / Imaging Site http://www.wgn.net/~nettles _______________________________________________ Cameramakers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://rmp.opusis.com/mailman/listinfo/cameramakers
