Greg Neville, Central Victoria Road, 2015

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This image was taken on a Canon G10, a high-end compact camera that has a tiny 5x7mm sensor. At full zoom, the camera is interpolating the information and the result is this soft, noisy result. The digital noise, in this case at least, creates a pointillist effect, like an Impressionist painting or a Pictorialist photograph made on the Autochrome colour process.

Autochrome photograph by unknown photographer, ‘Claude Monet outside his house at Giverny’, 1921.

Autochrome was the first commercial colour photography process, invented by the Lumiere brothers who also just happen to invent cinema. It was first marketed in 1907 and was taken up by some of the leading Pictorial photographers, Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe and others.

The medium consists of a glass plate coated on one side with a random mosaic of microscopic grains of potato starch dyed red-orange, green, and blue-violet which act as color filters. Lampblack fills the spaces between grains, and a black-and-white panchromatic silver halide emulsion is coated on top of the filter layer. (Wikipedia)