The roadside picture below was made using expired  Fujifilm  Superia 200 ASA  film  and a 1960’s  Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex S (SLR) with a 50mm Zeiss Pro-Tessar lens. I spent some time scoping this location on the Heysen Trail in terms of composition and lighting in relation to this camera/film combination. That process is a form of seeing photographically.

Classically photographic seeing was understood as practical skill of imagining what a scene would look like if it was photographed. It was termed pre-visualization by the modernists, or alternatively seeing what the world looks like in photographs made with a camera. Photographic seeing was camera vision.

The above representation  of  surviving  roadside vegetation along the Heysen Trail was made in late afternoon light with the mechanical apparatus of a vintage camera, geometric perspective embedded in the 50mm lens,  negative  film,  and a professional lab. This is what photography once was. The negative is transformed into a digital image where it is viewed on the screen of a computer, iPad or mobile phone. The negative’s transformation into a digital file is a process of  ‘dematerialisation’ in that  digital file is virtual, rather than a physical object such as a print or a page in a photobook.  

The digital photo is mobile as it is transmitted around the world from email to email, blog to Flickr, website to website, uploaded and downloaded.  In the process it becomes a digitally reproduced image,  or a copy of a copy of a copy, or a simulacrum. etc. True, there is a still physical object such as the negative with this particular roadside image, but it is a hybrid image.