Application for a patent for a camera
I had several conversations with first year students this year about the relationship between drawing and photography. Because of the apparent ubiquity of the photographic image, there is a strong belief that drawing is not as relevant as it was. I still beg to differ.
Before a camera can be made, all its parts will have been drawn, both for the patent office and as technical drawings that can be converted into information for machines to follow so that the individual components can be made.
When you need to explain how a camera works, diagrams are nearly always used to show how the various components work.
A pentaprism is often used in SLRs to get light to the eye without inverting the image. An understanding of how this works requires a basic grasp of geometry and geometry is a type of drawing.
If your camera uses mirrors again it would be geometric drawing that clarified how the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.
When a camera is put together in a factory an assembly line diagrammatic drawing is made to ensure that everything is put together in the right order.
When you need to know how all the individual components fit together a drawing is needed.
The importance of the artist who visualised how all the elements fit together is reflected in the fact that this drawing is signed.
The drawing above was made in 1976, not long after I had been working in a draftsman's office myself and my job was to produce drawings like this to enable people to understand how things worked. As in all forms of work that involve skill, some people are better than others at what they do, in this case J. la Guernie was one of those people who had a talent for this sort of drawing at that time in France.
It doesn't matter what sort of camera or aspect of a camera, such as a bellows extension or lens diaphragm, in order for the idea to be realised it would need to have been visualised and therefore drawn. It is usually at the patent office that all the first drawings are kept.
Patent drawing for the box camera
Patent drawing for the polaroid camera
Patent drawing for a movie camera
This tradition continues and although the drawings are now done using CAD, drawings are still primary information, you can't feed a photographic image of an idea into a machine and get it to be made. All 3D printers need three co-ordinate wire frame constructions to work from, even if the initial information comes from a camera taking multi-viewpoints, these many viewpoints are stitched together into a framework that is geometrically determined and coordinates plotted on a graph.
The complexity of coordinates in what is actually a very simple drawing of a staircase is resolved if you work your way through them one at a time. You can see how easily the number of reference points builds up, and then if you wanted to twist the drawing through let's say just 5 degrees and then a further 5 degrees, the density of drawn coordinates would quickly become far too difficult to navigate, which is why at a certain level of complexity its best to let a computer handle the maths. However even at its most complex a computer generated drawing is still basically a drawing. A drawing constructed by plotting points along x, y and z axes and then joining them using lines.
Using x, y and z axes to determine where a point in space is.
Over the years technical drawings have reflected changes in drawing technology, the advent of the computer being just the latest, but on the street and in places where decisions have to be made without new technology, drawing with a pencil or biro by hand is still vital to an understanding of what is happening.
People thinking about how to link video cameras up
In the two cases above, it is clear that as technology develops, there is still a need for drawing, if only to clarify how to connect the various elements of a complicated wiring system.
In both still and moving image photography it is not just the technical equipment that relies on drawing. Composition and selection for film is often storyboarded and printed storyboard templates for this are still available.
Film storyboard template
Storyboard for Psycho shower scene
Ridley Scott did all his own storyboards for Alien and of course decided to use HR Giger's drawings for the alien creature.
H R Giger: Sketch for alien
Long before cameras were invented artists realised that the proportions or aspect ratio of a rectangle could be used to help control the way people looked. Most DSLR camera sensors have a 3:2 aspect ratio which is the same as 35 mm film. This aspect ratio was decided when Leica made the first 35mm film cameras. The 3:2 aspect ratio is double an old movie film frame; because Oscar Barnack, the Leica inventor, rotated the film for cinema cameras through 90 degrees and in doing so doubled the width of the frame to create the ‘full frame’ 35mm still camera format. In the early days of the cinema because of a lack of standardisation, films were made using a variety of different film widths and projection speeds, but eventually the 35-mm wide Edison film stock became the standard format. This format would have been decided upon initially as a drawing, using a ruler and set square, because when it comes to deciding on the ratio of a rectangle we use geometry, and because manufactured things have to be first of all understood as technical drawings.
Ratio is a geometric idea and geometry is a drawn construction. So when you are trying to compose an image or make a selection using your 35mm SLR, it is worth thinking about all those artists in the years before the invention of the camera, who also used a frame to help them compose.
Van Gogh, although living at a time when the camera was coming into everyday use, still used an old fashioned perspective frame. Do read his letters if you ever have the chance to, because they are wonderful examples of how an artist thinks. He refers to the use of a perspective frame several times in them. In one of his letters to his brother Theo, he complained about trying to work in the dunes, where the ground is very uneven, "This is why I’m having a new and, I hope, better perspective frame made, which will stand firmly on two legs in uneven ground like the dunes". Then in another letter he complained about expenses, "I had more expenses in connection with the study of perspective and proportion for an instrument described in a work by Albrecht Dürer and used by the Dutchmen of old. It makes it possible to compare the proportions of objects close at hand with those on a plane further away, in cases where construction according to the rules of perspective isn’t feasible. Which, if you do it by eye, will always come out wrong, unless you’re very experienced and skilled. I didn’t manage to make the thing the first time around, but I succeeded in the end after trying for a long time with the aid of the carpenter and the smith. And I think that with more work I can get much better results still." Later once he has got to grips with how to use the frame he states, "Long and continuous practice with it enables one to draw quick as lightning - and, once the drawing is done firmly, to paint quick as lightning too.." From: The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Penguin Classics 1997.
The gridded frame for Van Gogh was something he took from Dürer, an idea that stretches back through hundreds of years of painting and drawing.
There is a certain back and forth with artists moving between the idea of using camera obscuras and tracing frames but the fact that images had to be made by hand and often transferred from one surface to another and that they often also had to be re-sized, meant that a squared up image became central to many artists' thinking when it came to composition. The squaring up also allowed artists to link the internal divisions within an image with the external dimensions of the frame.
When you look through the view finder of a camera, you are using a selection frame, one that you can if you want to, add a grid to. This is again something that as an idea began with drawing.
See also:
Mathematics and rightness (Includes information on the Golden Section)
Drawing and film
The grid as a cage
The weaving of grids
35mm film used in a movie camera
35mm film used in a still camera
Van Gogh, although living at a time when the camera was coming into everyday use, still used an old fashioned perspective frame. Do read his letters if you ever have the chance to, because they are wonderful examples of how an artist thinks. He refers to the use of a perspective frame several times in them. In one of his letters to his brother Theo, he complained about trying to work in the dunes, where the ground is very uneven, "This is why I’m having a new and, I hope, better perspective frame made, which will stand firmly on two legs in uneven ground like the dunes". Then in another letter he complained about expenses, "I had more expenses in connection with the study of perspective and proportion for an instrument described in a work by Albrecht Dürer and used by the Dutchmen of old. It makes it possible to compare the proportions of objects close at hand with those on a plane further away, in cases where construction according to the rules of perspective isn’t feasible. Which, if you do it by eye, will always come out wrong, unless you’re very experienced and skilled. I didn’t manage to make the thing the first time around, but I succeeded in the end after trying for a long time with the aid of the carpenter and the smith. And I think that with more work I can get much better results still." Later once he has got to grips with how to use the frame he states, "Long and continuous practice with it enables one to draw quick as lightning - and, once the drawing is done firmly, to paint quick as lightning too.." From: The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Penguin Classics 1997.
Van Gogh's perspective frame and above that a drawing he did of him using it
A film on Van Gogh's use of perspective frames
There is a certain back and forth with artists moving between the idea of using camera obscuras and tracing frames but the fact that images had to be made by hand and often transferred from one surface to another and that they often also had to be re-sized, meant that a squared up image became central to many artists' thinking when it came to composition. The squaring up also allowed artists to link the internal divisions within an image with the external dimensions of the frame.
Study for a portrait of the Artist's wife, Robert Polhill Bevan 1915
When you look through the view finder of a camera, you are using a selection frame, one that you can if you want to, add a grid to. This is again something that as an idea began with drawing.
Using the grid on a phone camera
When you enable the grid on your mobile phone you are using a Renaissance idea that has been used in drawing studios over and over again for hundreds of years.
The Renaissance grid method
The thing about drawing is that it can be used in so many ways. From technical drawings for engineering, via geometry and measured drawing to rough diagrams on scraps of paper and expressive sketches explaining how someone could frame up a scene in a horror movie. It is this versatility that explains why it is still around and why it is still something to consider when using a camera, after all photography is in its own words, 'drawing with light'.
Mathematics and rightness (Includes information on the Golden Section)
Drawing and film
The grid as a cage
The weaving of grids
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