film, digital sensor, Shroud of Turin, whatever
It seems as though the author of gointothelight thinks the Shroud of Turin is some sort of photograph:
I was thinking about HDR (high dynamic range) photography the other day. . . . Let’s start with what dynamic range is. I’m gonna butcher it up a bit here. To be honest, I skimmed a PhD thesis worth of stuff on dynamic range in the last hour or so while contemplating this article. It’s deep and I’m gonna gloss across the top. Dynamic range is essentially how many zones, or f-stops of data your medium (film, digital sensor, Shroud of Turin, whatever) can capture without losing information. In other words, how much contrast can you capture?
Wonder why? We are seeing many more “off the wall” references to the shroud than we used to. Anyway, the posting has nothing to do with the shroud. But if you are interested in photography, this posting and the whole blog is very interesting.
Leave a Reply
Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
Interesting how people stumble upon your stuff. To be clear, I’m not specifically convinced on how the Shroud came to be, although I have read several books on it, nor was I really alluding to that. However, you could potentially treat a piece of cloth in a way that it could capture an image. (If figure the dynamic range of the shroud is about 1/2 f stop ;-)) So by using it as an example I was able to quickly bring an image to mind on an alternative media. It was a metaphorical shortcut. I’m glad you were able to get by that and enjoyed the rest of the blog! Thanks.