You’ve probably noticed from looking at photos or movies that no photograph is absolutely, 100% pristine. Each one has a speckly, spotty texture — usually barely perceptible if the photographer’s done their job right — which is formed as a technical artifact of the film or image sensor.
For pictures or movies taken on film, it’s called film grain, and it’s determined by the physical structure of the photographic film. On a digital photo, it’s image noise, which is an often random pattern created by the circuitry of the camera’s sensor.
Grain usually has to be very, very extreme for our brains to immediately perceive it; at normal levels, we often don’t even notice it unless we’re looking closely. But our brains are generally quite skilled at perceiving small visual patterns — the pages of a closed book, the bumps of paint on a wall, etc. — so does the average case of grain or noise fail to register? Perhaps it’s because we’ve learned to ignore the noisy, grainy pattern that we’re constantly seeing all the time.
Yes, our eyes have a film grain of their own.
So is this grain caused by a physical texture in our eyes, like film grain, or by something in our circuitry, like image noise? A little of both, in fact.
Continue reading ‘Do Human Eyes Have “Film Grain”?’
I Admire Steve Jobs the Way That Teddy Roosevelt Admired Elephants
Steve Jobs is a majestic beast, and I would like to shoot him with a blunderbuss.
He is a visionary and a genius, a rebel who lets nothing and no one stand in the way of his dream of the future. If only his vision of the future were less cynical.
Continue reading ‘I Admire Steve Jobs the Way That Teddy Roosevelt Admired Elephants’