Lecture : rough guide to digital dirt

Within this lecture it was all about thinking about the quality in images which are in the media. Its not talking about quality of our project but the quality of our technical work within the project.

In the lecture we learnt about Pixels within an image the more pixels you have the higher resolution it is going to be, once you lose quality you can not get that back, you have to learn how to manage the pixels which you have and make sure you don't do anything which will mess with your pixels. Photoshop was another thing we learnt about and how not to down scale your image unless you are sure and happy with the image which you have captured. We then looked at compression quality remember to shoot in RAW, you need to be in control.

Hito Steyerl quoted on the defence of the poor image ' Poor image are the contemporary wretched of the screen the debris of audio visual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies shores they testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audio visual capitalism' and this is what we do with images, we move them around.  Sounds are also compressed.

Sometimes pixels do work in your favour for example Michael J Totten who took a picture of a solider in Iraq,  he captured the moment of what is happening and the picture is showing this due to the pixels which are causing this fast movement of the action, it brings this image alive and causes people to realise the actually action of what this soldier's go through.

Clio Barnard was another person which was on the lecture, and he used a single shot he used a mobile phone and filmed a therapy session, he used the therapy session and created a video with the voice over of the person in therapy, it was recreating a memory. Vannevar Bush As we may think quoted ' compression is important, however when it comes to costs. The material for the microfilm Britannia would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent, what would it cost.

We then looked at Manu 'Faceless' and her using CCTV footage, she acted out scenes from her movies, she used lawyers to get back the images but had to have faces of others covered but not hers, this becomes a narrative based gives great effect.

Poor images circulate not only because of the compression algorithms that crunch their file size but also because of the network structures that distribute them.

How to avoid digital dirt still images
1. pixel dimensions versus resolution
2. pixels for screen
3. view at 100% in Photoshop or actual size
4. resolution for print
Dots/pixels per inch
The number of pixels
width 4000
height 3000

300 pixel at the end

must save things at high resolution (remember)

Pixels in an image of A4 print = 11.5x300= resolution you need
it = 3450 pixels