Digital technology opens new frontiers to image elaboration, as it happened over time with the evolution of photographic equipments, film, small cameras, electric application, lenses of all types, that changed photography and multiplied the photographer's creative possibilities. In the same way, digital technology today allows us to make "impossible" images, to overcome difficulties connected with physical spaces where the photographer can move, opens creative possibilities to development (which has always been "freely" exerted in the dark room) by applying it in a selective way to light and color. And, above all, it allows the photographer to manage all processes of building the image, of planning photographs for digital elaboration, of making the final product without intermediaries. In other words, it allows the photographer to regain control of his own creativity.

The technique of digital processing has no frontiers in the purely creative photographic work. The possibility of making selective interventions in color, light and contrast remove borders from the creation of images linked to the most different areas, from fashion to fast food, from architecture to portraits. The control over all stages, from the shooting to the processing, allows us to look at one subject at a time. Both the shooting and its changes allow us to create a unique and more coherent project.

The Strozzi Chapel, in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, has two walls painted by Filippino Lippi. They are one opposite the other. When we see this chapel, the view from the ground is difficult because of the limited space. If we were to build scaffolding, it would not help much because a single photo would not include all of the frescoes. With an orthogonal reconstruction of space, we were able to detect the shooting points of the 16 images on the wall, which was later reconstructed as a whole on the computer. The final image allows us to have a vision, which would have been otherwise impossible, of the frescos. And this view is correct from all points of views, as digital processing allows us to have an image that would be otherwise impossible with ordinary lenses (for example a super grand angular lens would have changed all prospective) while maintaining the full correspondence with reality.

WHEN DIGITAL IS PROVIDENTIAL
by Lello Piazza

There is a moment in the photographic process that, in general, makes every one agree on the legitimacy of the use of digital technique: the last stage of this process, the one that leads to the publication of a photo in a magazine or to it hanging on the wall. Its name is post-production. In reality, post-producing an image can mean both changing its testimonial or aesthetic value (and in this case the digital processing is to be discussed) or, ensuring its best result. In the case of the photo we show here, thanks to a digital processing, we were able to obtain a result that would have been otherwise impossible "from reality" but which makes reality absolutely true. In the tomb of Bannantiu in Bahariya, because of the presence of four big columns, it was impossible to shoot one of the four walls with only one picture. Limits were given by the unavoidable deformations of the super grand angular optics. Its author, Sandro Vannini, chose an "ordinary" lens, without aberrations, which however did not allow him to frame the whole wall. Therefore Vannini decided to shoot several partial shots that he would then "put together", partly overlapping them, with the computer. It was not easy to put this idea into practice. "In order to obtain a complete portrait of the walls without any prospectic deformation," Sandro tells us: "We surveyed the grave in an axonometric projection. This allowed us to pinpoint the shooting points from which we shot pictures, which are all at a distance of about one meter and a half from the walls. We shot some one hundred pictures, and we assembled them in Italy, with a post-production process utilizing software linked with the axonometric reconstruction and which gives a perfect result, without any deformation. The problem of perspective was not the only difficulty we had to overcome. We also had to check the lights with great precision, as they had to have the same distribution. We had to make many moving of lamps (and their dispensers) between one shooting and the other because of the limited space available. We used the MHI lamps for cold light, which, in such a reduced space, assured the maintenance of an acceptable temperature inside the tomb. Notwithstanding we spent several hours working there to preserve the frescoes.

From "Airone" magazine, no.249 - January 2002-04-22