Brief talk by SZE: Image Noise in Photography

Image noise is random variation of brightness or colour information in images. We are often told by articles and photographers to remove it as its textures could potentially ruin our photographs. Therefore, as a newbie photographer, I have been striving to avoid image noise as suggested. That is, until one day during my editing, when an intrusive thought came in front of my face: what if we break this norm by pulling the exposure bar to its highest, as well as the other functions that we are told to not to touch, and liberate this electronic noise, allowing it to sit freely in frame?

The following photographs are the results of my experiment: 

It was a great experiment. I suppose what we see no longer are the solid blocks of objects but what shapes them. It is each individual photon that gathers in spots  to create shades and lights, and at every second, this interaction unfolds at the speed of 3x108 m/s. The very moment we capture is then the world of those live particles we store perpetually, that only appearance that can never be re-created. 

To me, this type of photographs exposes the underlying dynamics. I feel that there is some sort of energy compacted into those images so violently, and, on the other hand, those rough particles arranged themselves so neatly in such a way that they could seem to be exploded in any frame of time, where everything collapses and reforms back to one medium. It seems like this even mirrors the planets were formed through The Big Bang!