Photography Chat

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3:20 AM

@uhoh I'm pretty sure anyone who will be willing to bid what it will take to win the auction of the "only photo of Neil Armstrong on the Moon" will be perfectly aware that there's a dot sized reflection of Armstrong in Aldrin's visor in what is perhaps the most recognizable photo in the history of photography.

@uhoh But Armstrong didn't dart out from behind the LEM just as this photo was taken. He's not inside the scene being photographed. Only his reflection is. That's not a reflection of Buzz Aldrin. He was actually standing in the direction the camera was pointed. The intent of the photographer, Neil Armstrong, was to take a picture of "Buzz Aldrin on the Moon". It's a photo of Buzz Aldrin.

uhoh

3:44 AM

@MichaelC every photograph is already a refraction I don't see why reflection is less real. Semantically one might like to say one has "photographed a reflection", but of course if you focus on the mirror your picture will be fuzzy. A reflection is not a thing. We still focus our cameras on the object itself, and we photograph it. I choose to stick with the reality of the optics and physics rather than the semantics.

Reflections are not things, they are not real, and they can not be photographed. We photograph objects, and reflection along with refraction are processes which affect the the light between object and image planes, but we don't photograph refractions or reflections themselves.

Michael C

@uhoh Every photo is not a refraction. Plenty of photos have been taken using a pinhole camera.

uhoh

reflection, refraction, illumination, focusing... all processes.

@MichaelC Ah! That's 100% correct, thanks! :-)

Michael C

A reflection in a photograph is "less real" because it is light that is at least one further step removed from the object off which the reflection is bouncing. That is not a photo of Neil Armstrong on Buzz Aldrin's visor. It's a photo of Buzz Aldrin with a reflection of Neil Armstrong on his visor. The image we see of Buzz is where he actually stood in relation to the camera. The reflection we see of Armstrong is not were he was standing in relation to the camera. That's the difference.

uhoh

There's even coded aperture masks, scatterometry and even interferometry, and those folks who use photon timing to deduce what's standing behind a wall from reconstructing time of flight of diffuse light from another wall. But all are processes, and all result are images of the object

"less real" is a semantic distinction. You could say that the camera focused on a virtual object but that's just a tool when we try to do ray-tracing on paper. There's a real object and a real image in photography.

No photograph shows the "real position" of anything. Pinhole cameras give us perspective projection which of course looks terrible and quite unreal if you photograph someone from 5 cm away from their nose then print it out and hang it on the wall.

7 hours later…

uhoh

11:13 AM

Q: Is there only one photograph of Neil Armstrong on the Moon?

Christie's is a famous auction house. In their press release and marketing material, Christie's Voyage to Another World: The Victor Martrin-Malburet Photograph Collection, you can find the following claims Lot 345, The only photograph of Neil Armstrong on the Moon, July 16-24,1969. BUZZ ALDRIN [...