Jim Mathis Photography

A photo or video image is made up of all shades of gray from black to white and all the colors that go along with them. The goal is for the whites to be white and the blacks to be black with everything in the middle to be in the right place along the scale. There are two general ways to do this. One is to start with a white surface such as white paper or canvas and build up pigment or ink to get to black. With good paper and high quality printers or paint, this works great. The opposite approach is to start with a black surface such as a TV or computer monitor and light it up to produce white. This also works very well. In each case how black the screen or how white the paper are big factors in the quality of the image. A nearly impossible task is start with a white surface and try to light it to produce a whole range of tones from black to white. This is theoretically impossible and practically very difficult. Movie theaters are able to do this for all practical purposes by dark

When digital photography first came on the scene, there was a big debate about how many pixels, or picture elements, it would take to make digital photography as good as film. When the first one million pixel cameras (one-meg) came out it is was very encouraging because we could see that it was going to happen, digital was going to work. Before long two-meg cameras were here producing very good results. Five-meg cameras had the ability to surpass 35mm and were taking aim at medium format. My first digital camera was a five-meg Olympus which I have used to make beautify 16x20 and larger prints. I like to think of the number of mega-pixels a camera has as being comparable to the horsepower of a car. A minimum amount is needed for sure, but horsepower does not determine the quality of the car or even how fast it will go. There are many other factors that are more important. It is the same with cameras. It turns out that after a minimum of about 3 or 4 meg, the number of

If your pictures are blurry or not as sharp as you would like, the most likely thing is camera movement. If you are firing a rifle at a target and you miss, the only thing that could have happened is you moved the gun. Photography is the same, if you pictures are not sharp, there is a good chance that the camera moved. When I was in the photo-finishing business, the vast majority of the millions of photos I saw were degraded to some degree by camera movement. When I show my large photographs at art shows or people come to my home or studio, they often ask how I get the pictures so sharp. Some people even ask what kind of special equipment I use to make 36 inch wide photos. When I tell them I just hold the camera steady, they think I am joking. When I have one-on-one students, I often teach them how to hold the camera and to practice holding it steady to get better pictures. Part of the problem is the design of the cameras. High performance cameras are designed to make them easier to ho