Statistical Art
What is the essence of photography? What is common for all photography techniques? In my exploration of the nature and substance of photography I found that this is the number. Number of photons which hit the photo-sensible material or digital chip. The number of photons is then transformed into another number. In case of negative film is it transformed into scale of gray. In case of digital chip it is number itself stored on digital medium as a 3-dimensional matrix. 2 dimensions are formed by X and Y spatial directions and the third one keeps information about three color channels.
I play with these numbers individually using statistical methods. Each photo in the series is the result of stacking a set of time-lapse photos (from 30 to 500 pieces) and statistical analysis of individual pixels. Using a tool, I usually use in my scientific work, I created photos (or better say matrices) of values of four statistical moments:
1. Mean value.
2. Standard deviation, which is a measure of change, difference, scattering of pixel values.
3. Skewness, which shows asymmetry of values.
4. Kurtosis, which represents concentration of values.
Mean value can be treated as exposition with long exposition time. Standard deviation shows where there was a change of a photographed scene. Skewness has high value when the change appears on few moments only. Kurtosis is unintuitive. Apart of statistical information the results have aesthetic value. The series of photos are organized as follows: Mean value: top left, standard deviation: bottom left, skewness: top right, kurtosis: bottom right. I leave spectator to interpret what happen in the scene.
