För att sammanfatta mitt examensarbete har jag undersökt vad de bakomliggande faktorernaför en bilds genrekategorisering påverkas av, ifall det är innehållet i bilden som påverkar desseffekt eller om det är antingen publikskontexten/produktionskontexten som avgör en bildsgenre. Till min hjälp bestämde jag mig för att åka till Japan och träffa en fotograf vid namnSaid Karlsson för att genomföra en etnografisk studie och intervjua honom på plats. Delsgjorde jag detta genom att hitta skillnader mellan varandras bilder och att fotografera sakersom intresserar mig i Japan som blev en del av min medieproduktion. Vad undersökningen resulterade, med hjälp av intervjun och diskussionerna om varandras bilder, var att en bilds genre avgörs inte av innehållet i en bild, det är i kontextsammanhanget bilden befinner sig inom. / To summarize my thesis, I investigated what the underlying factors for an image genre categorization is influenced by, if it is the content of the image, which affects its effect or if it is either the audience context / production context that determines a picture's genre. To my help I decided to go to Japan and meet a photographer named Said Karlsson to conduct an ethnographic study and interview him on the spot. Firstly, I did this by finding the differences between each image and to photograph things that interest me in Japan that became part of my media production. What investigation resulted, with the help of the interview and discussions about each other's pictures, was that a picture's genre is not determined by the content of an image, it is in the context context, the picture is within.

Multispectral imaging systems provide much of the basic data used by the land and ocean civilian remote sensing community. There are numerous multispectral imaging systems which have been and are being developed. A common way to compare the radiometric performance of these sensors is to examine their noise equivalent change in reflectance, NEDeltarho. The NEDeltarho of a sensor is the reflectance difference that is equal to the noise in the recorded signal. In order to directly compare the sensors, calculations of the parameter being compared need to have a common basis. This thesis compares the noise equivalent change in reflectance of seven different multispectral imaging systems (AVHRR, AVIRIS, ETM, HIRIS, MODIS-N, SPOT-1/HRV, and TM) for a set of three atmospheric conditions (continental aerosol with 23 km visibility, continental aerosol with 5 km visibility, and a Rayleigh atmosphere), five values of ground reflectance (0.01, 0.10, 0.25, 0.50, and 1.00), a nadir viewing angle, and a solar zenith angle of forty-five degrees.

This thesis is structured around a central overriding question: to what extent can the practice of landscape photography be used to make visible the politics of landscape in borderland territories? Introduced by architect Teddy Cruz, the ‘political equator’ suggests an alternative politics of space through which to critically consider socio-economic and geopolitical processes associated with globalisation under neoliberal capitalism. This equator is based on a revised geography of the post-9/11 world, whereby a line drawn across a world map intersects at three contested desert territories: 1) the Mexico USA frontier; 2) southern Spain and northern Morocco; and 3) Palestine/Israel. This concept and its implications for human mobility, porous frontiers and material readings of landscape are explored through my photographic practice. In this work I challenge the idea of ‘hard borders’ between sovereign nation-states and make new political and symbolic associations between the territories along the political equator. Landscape can be seen as a cultural construct imbued with social uses and a more abstract set of desires. Photography as both a material and imaginative medium is able to simultaneously narrate and re-shape landscape. Through my three projects, Imported Landscapes (2010), Badlands (2011) and Gardening the Suburbs (2013) I examine and translate borderland territories. I produce photographs that suggest how these landscapes embody the contradictions of globalisation and carry the traces of past empires and geographies. I analyse the creation of a built environment and the construction of a post-natural landscape to suggest that our understanding of landscape – in ‘real-life’ and as it is aesthetically configured in images – is something materially arranged and a product of the imagination. My practice facilitates an imaginative engagement with potential future political sustainability or modification of these landscapes. Visuality plays a pivotal role in the production of contemporary geo-politics. By exploring three of my art projects in relation to historical and contemporary visual representations of desert borderlands, political and symbolic readings of the desert emerge as inherently connected. This thesis creates an innovative connection between early photographic practices in landscape and their later critical and conceptual versions. The thesis considers the ways in which my work translates, critiques and revises these conventions. I approach landscape phenomenologically, understanding it not as a static entity but as a process. This process is composed of and shaped by human and animal life, material object and place. Through an analysis of my own embodied engagement with landscape and my material and imaginative experience of landscape photographs, this thesis opens new ways of narrating the thresholds of the political equator.

Computational imaging presents opportunities to overcome conventional imaging limits, such as a trade-off between image resolution and system z-height. Optical design and image processing are developed in parallel to optimise imaging system properties for a given application. These properties can be quantified and it is shown that the image quality of a multichanneled imaging system, relying on superresolution (SR) image reconstruction, is dependent on object depth due to interference of sampling phases. A novel multichannel imaging system that does not rely on SR reconstruction, yet achieves a reduction of system height by a factor of two, is presented. The mitigation of SR reconstruction reduces computational effort, offering an attractive option for a computational imaging device in the mobile handset market. The image reconstruction framework required for the reduced height multichanneled imager is proposed in a general form so that it is applicable to many multi-aperture geometries, making it compatible with commercial interests, i.e. it is sensible to develop something with a wide application space. A second novel imaging system is also described in this thesis: A snapshot hyperspectral imaging (HSI) camera, comprising of a square array of miniature camera modules, makes use of the multiple imaging channels to record spectrally distinct images. The generalised image processing framework is applied to the image reconstruction problem to generate the spectral data-cubes. This approach to hyperspectral imaging presents opportunities to gain performance advantages over other snapshot HSI technologies and do so at a significant reduction in cost.

This study is an exploration of everyday photographic practice and of the places that photographers visit and inhabit offline and online. It discusses the role of movement, the senses and repetition in taking photographs. Ultimately it is about photographers and their photographic routines and habits. Since the advent of photography, numerous texts on the subject have typically focused on photographs as objects. This trend has continued into the digital age, with academic writing firmly focusing on image culture rather than considering new issues relating to online practice. Although various technological innovations have given the photographer flexibility as to how and what they do with their images, the contention of this thesis is that analogue routines have been mostly transposed into the digital age. Nevertheless, there remains a lack of empirical enquiry into what photographers actually do within online spaces. This study is one of the first to address this knowledge gap. Taking a unique approach to the study of photography, it draws upon work in various fields, including phenomenology, social anthropology, human geography and sensory ethnography, to produce an innovative conceptual and methodological approach. This approach is applied in the field to gain an in-depth understanding of what ‘doing’ photography actually entails. An in-depth analysis of interviews with and observations of North East photographers reveals how they engage with everyday life in a distinctive way. Habitually carrying a camera allows them to notice details that most would ignore. Online and offline movements often become entangled, and when photographers explore Flickr there is a clear synergy with the way in which they explore their local city space. This research is a call to others to give serious consideration to online and offline photography practices, and an attempt to stimulate new discussions about what it means to be a photographer in the world.

This thesis is concerned with the development and implications of a critical mode of inquiry into the architectural environment as it is articulated in the photographic projects of German artists Eric Mendelsohn (1887-1953) and Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). These projects are understood as being in opposition to a conventional subordination of photography to architecture. The architectural photograph has consistently been reduced to the role of a tool in the proliferation of structures of global capitalism, facilitating the rise of homogeneous and disconnected built environments. Through an examination and comparison of Mendelsohn’s 1926 book Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten with Tillmans' 2014 video installation Book for Architects, this thesis argues that the visual strategies employed in these works reflect similar concerns regarding the state of architectural practice, providing alternative avenues of inquiry for architects, and highlighting the necessity for deeper engagement with the phenomenological qualities of the architectural environment.

Hostages contains two interwoven analyses of the author’s visual investigations. Living Figurative discusses the psychological space in which figurative and literal may become confused, and the way in which figurative threats operate beyond their natural boundaries. The result is a cycle of delusion, blame, and deflection, perpetuated through verbal nonsense, which is then validated through spectacle. Apocalyptic literature and conspiracy theories function through this method. While most of society believes Nobody is to blame for cultural conflict, the extremist uses the force of Not-Me, the ability to make a caricature from oneself and place it on another. Photojournalism uses this same mode to turn its subjects into dignified caricatures. Worse as a Picture contends that the artist can help viewers disarm internalized, figurative threats through exposure to the concept of death. This should be done through gradual, subliminal means, as there is no way to fully comprehend finality.

QC 351 A7 no. 38 / A brief description is given of the various types of image tubes presently used in astronomical research and a review is presented of the past applications of image tubes to direct astronomical photography. A detailed laboratory evaluation of the Carnegie image tube is summarized and photographs at the telescope are presented to confirm and extend the results obtained in the laboratory. Iris photometry of stellar images can be carried out on Carnegie tube photographs with about the same accuracy as is obtained by normal photographic techniques. Compared to unaided plates the image tube typically requires about 1/15 the exposure time to record stellar images of a specified threshold magnitude. When exposures are made to near the sky limit, however, the Carnegie tube cannot record stars as faint as can be recorded with an unaided plate. When exposed at a given focal length telescope, the limiting magnitude of an image tube record is about 1 magnitude brighter than that of an unaided photograph. Primarily two characteristics of the Carnegie tube, an over-all mottled sensitivity pattern and a light- induced background, are found to be responsible for the loss in limiting magnitude of a Carnegie tube record. The mottle pattern is characterized by an rms variation in sensitivity of ±1.3 percent. It modulates the photographic record of the night-sky radiation and seriously affects the signal -to -noise ratio of the threshold images. The additional background produced by the light- induced background of the image tube generally amounts to 25 percent of the night-sky radiation on a sky-limited photograph. In order to record the same sky-limited magnitude on a Carnegie tube plate and an unaided plate, the image tube record must be exposed at a longer focal length telescope. The exposure time required by the image tube is then about 1/2 to 1/3 that of the unaided plate. Because of the higher scale of the image tube photograph in such a case, however, the effective gain provided by the image tube over the unaided plate is generally somewhat larger than the relative exposure time. The photography of extended objects is found to be particularly affected by the nonuniformities of the image tube. Besides reducing the over-all signal-to-noise ratio of the image tube record, the generalmottle pattern and additional discrete patches and ripples in sensitivity of the image tube tend to mimic low contrast features of galaxies and nebulae. The rather subjective effects of the nonuniformities can be significantly reduced by using telescopes with moderately long focal lengths, so that the seeing image is then large in comparison to the nonuniformities. The photography of astronomical sources through narrowband interference filters has been found to be a particularly promising application of the Carnegie image tube. Preliminary tests reported in the present study include the photography of supernova remnants, planetary nebulae, galaxies, and reflection nebulae. The basic quality criterion for comparing the image tube to unaided photographic emulsions is argued to be the detective quantum efficiency. Typical values of the gain over unaided emulsions provided by the Carnegie tube are calculated to be in the range 10 to 20. It is emphasized, however, that because of the variety of requirements in specific research areas and because of the several unique characteristics of a given image tube, no single figure of merit may be defined that will predict the usefulness of an image tube in all applications. It is suggested that the resolution of a detector should not generally be combined into the calculation of a single figure of merit but should be considered as a separate quality criterion. Certain problems with the Carnegie tube (and other image tubes as well) potentially limit its usefulness in specific research areas. Besides the problems already mentioned, other problems include low resolution, geometrical distortion, the complexities of analyzing the final record (as compared to an unaided photograph), and the limited field of the image tube. Each of these characteristics can be highly significant or entirely inconsequential in different applications.

Light is a recurring image in my work. To represent light, I use vivid images of shadows illuminating different values with the intention of setting particular moods and feelings. Light is an essential element for all life. It has a subliminal message of peace, life, clarification, illumination, beginnings and endings. The softness of the gentle sunrise in the beginning of the day and the drama of the light at sunset adds beauty to everything it touches. As an artist, light inspires me spiritually as it simultaneously reveals the extreme beauty and force of the natural world.

This thesis explores the evolution of my practice as it developed over my two years of graduate school. I entered school interested in the built environment and how structures helped create subjectivity and provided sites for material and phenomenological transformations. Early in graduate school, I developed a photography series that investigated these issues. However, an awareness of a conversation occurring in the larger art world that questioned the efficacy of photography drove me to consider ways to extend my practice into sculpture and installation. Over the next two semesters, I developed my ideas of light, form and structure into video and sculpture installations that extended these ideas out into the space of the viewer. Ultimately, an interest in light and surface led me back to photography and to the realization that a studio practice that focused on photography about photography opened up avenues that allowed a photographic practice not to become stagnant but rather to grow and expand.