witterings

Check out a Horizon prog called Is Seeing Believing? on BBC iPlayer.

It's really about what used to be called cognitive sciences; that phrase must have gone out of fashion because it didn't come up once in the show. It does cover, in flimsy form, some of the ground opened up in Palmer's Vision Science. As ever on TV, it tries to do too much in too little time and so leaves everything it touches only half-covered, and allows the participants too much credibility. The german prof who keeps talking about "a new sense" is, of course, just a nuisance: her so-called new sense is in reality a re-trained old sense, touch. But the show introduces a fascinating subject. I hope there's more to come.

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The Sunday Times showed the winning entrants to its landscape competition this week, which will eventually materialize in the National Theatre.

There are some beautiful pictures, but there is also a worrying trend. It would seem that there are now landscape photographers who have got it into their heads that they have to use HDR for everything.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. An unavoidable fact about photographs in any root form is that they cannot encompass the same range of light as the eye/brain complex. RAW files can get close to it, but they're not photographs. So various techniques have evolved which allow for the extraction of information from a higher range than is technically possible. In simple terms, this usually involves taking two or more versions of the same image shot with different exposures and stitching them together.

If used subtly this technique enhances an image without being visible.

For some reason, the subtle approach seems to be out of favour. Instead, photographers are taking wonderful landscape images, and then perverting their look so as to make them appear exactly like computer generated images, as in the best of the console games.

It's a strange direction. The Sunday Times seems to like it. This has the bizarre result of making the winners of a prestige landscape photography competition look like the muddled ramblings of a teenage render-jockey.