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Photography technology has influenced what people consider a good picture

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Re: Photography technology has influenced what people consider a good picture

#152
post #7

Another recent example of how "bad photography" inspired "good photos" is Juergen Teller's shoot with W magazine. https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/best-performances-portfoli... The photos are typical of Juergen's style. But his style has been evolving more into casual snapshot aesthetic, but in more ironic way.

I liked Scott Alexander's take on it. You only need to distinguish yourself from the class below, because no one would mistake you from someone two classes below.

The rich or famous can cosplay poverty, but the people in between can't, for fear of being mistaken as poor.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/

Re: Photography technology has influenced what people consider a good picture

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me how long that will hold. Maybe it will hold forever. But, I can certainly imagine my iPhone45 or Pixel53 will take say 100k frames per second so in 1/250th of a second they could take 400 images in a wide angle or multiple angles and then through computational photography reproduce almost any image that a current high DSLR could take at almost any lighting with almost any focus, after the fact.

I don't think that's possible. There are physical limitations we're already bumping into. A lens can only have a limited resolution. It's pointless to make a sensor that's got more pixels than the lens can produce. The amount of light coming in is limited, and the sensor can't gather more than 100% the light. A sensor has a quantum efficiency stat, which tells you how likely is it that a photon will turn into an elec…

This stuff has always interested me but I've never done a deep dive into the science; do you have any recommended readings?

Maybe phones will become a new arbitrary standard like 135 film was. Modern APS-C sensors and larger will be dubbed 'Large Format,' something of interest only to enthusiasts but meaningless to the average consumer.

Re: Photography technology has influenced what people consider a good picture

#155
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can see it doing the equivalent of buying a vintage roadster as a senior citizen Funny you should put it this way, because it’s the same crowd buying both: wealthy old guys. Some time around the 1990s, Canon and Nikon made the fateful decision that photography would become stupid expensive and accessible only to those with money to burn. Don’t get me wrong, modern DSLRs and AF lenses are amazing feats of engineer…

I think anyone, even millennials and gen z, that gets serious about photography will quickly start to find the deficiencies of their phone camera. Sure, there is a lot you can do with a phone. Even some stuff you can't do well with a dedicated camera. But everyone who really gets into the craft starts to see that they can't quite get the shot they want I'm the lighting they want with a single, one size fits all devic…

To be fair, there are also lots of things you can only do with a phone camera, like have it on you at all times like a visual notepad.

One of my favorite books is Jerry Hsu's The Beautiful Flower is the World, a collection of phone pictures brilliantly juxtaposed to tragicomedic effect [1]. NYC street photo grandmaster Jeff Mermelstein now only uses his phone, to take pictures of other peoples' phones [2]. It's an interesting parabolic trajectory where the 'better' you get, the 'worse' your equipment can be, almost like how 'bad' fashion is an ironic indicator of 'good' fashion sense.

[1] https://www.fstopmagazine.com/blog/2019/09/book-review-the-b...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-photograph...

Re: Photography technology has influenced what people consider a good picture

#156
post #137

Wim Wenders had some pretty strong words about phone photography, claiming it's no longer photography but a new medium itself [1]. "The less you have, the more creative you have to become." In On Photography , Susan Sontag argued that photography, which itself took a while to become considered an art form, gradually began to absolve painting of its duty to represent 'reality.' I can see 'phonetography' doing the same…

I also a return to analog in some who have grown up with cameras in their phones. I guess the experience of only having 24 pictures and developing becomes meaningful/ interesting when you are used to unlimited and direct.

Great art comes from limitations. As Spielberg said, if he had access to CG when he made Jaws the shark would've been in every frame.

Re: Photography technology has influenced what people consider a good picture

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's possible. There are physical limitations we're already bumping into. A lens can only have a limited resolution. It's pointless to make a sensor that's got more pixels than the lens can produce. The amount of light coming in is limited, and the sensor can't gather more than 100% the light. A sensor has a quantum efficiency stat, which tells you how likely is it that a photon will turn into an elec…

This stuff has always interested me but I've never done a deep dive into the science; do you have any recommended readings? Maybe phones will become a new arbitrary standard like 135 film was. Modern APS-C sensors and larger will be dubbed 'Large Format,' something of interest only to enthusiasts but meaningless to the average consumer.

I'm afraid not offhand, I'm a hobbyist in the area and picked up a bunch of stuff from here and there.

But, "APS-C" won't become known as "large format". Those terms are already in use in photography and already hold specific meanings, even if there's some wiggle room. Micro four thirds is the smallest serious size, still far bigger than what a cell phone can have, APS-C is the consumer DSLR size, full frame matches the size of 35mm film, and it goes further to medium format and large format. Medium format is already quite specialized at starts at $5K, and large format is extremely specialized territory and not for normal people.

Re: Photography technology has influenced what people consider a good picture

#158
post #149
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think even Alan Turing himself ever envisioned this.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I already passed the Voight-Kampff test. Didn't even need to fire my gun! :) As for GPT-3, well, it needs real input—like the above—to generate its contents. Here's a crude fore-runner taking postmodern discourse to the extreme: https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Cheers. I genuinely can't tell the difference between the artificially generated postmodern discourse that is supposed to be just gibberish and real postmodern discourse that is not. Perhaps this is just a case of extreme jargon overload that makes it unintelligible for anyone who is not part of the group?

Or is this some commentary on the futility of the discourse, and postmodern discourse is just a performance art?

Re: Photography technology has influenced what people consider a good picture

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shorter focal lengths have other purposes in street photography, where composing shots in crowded areas can be difficult or impossible with longer lenses like 85mm. In terms of which focal lengths produce perspectives that make the most sense to our eyes, people usually point towards 35-50mm lenses. Supposedly the formula is something like "focal length = diagonal measurement of the format".

I'm well-versed on the benefits of shorter lenses. Look through a "normal" lens (~42mm equiv) and you'll realize that it's actually nowhere near our field of vision (FOV), peripheral included. What a normal lens does is take a very narrow slice of our FOV and represent it neatly and proportionally, i.e. given two similarly framed portraits, a 40mm would make your nose look "normal" whereas a 28mm would make it look l…

I know how lens compression works. Though I specifically used the 35mm-50mm range because it depends on whether you take the diagonal directly, the diagonal of a square with edge length equal to the long edge of a 35mm sensor, or the diagonal of a square with edge length equal to the short edge of a 35mm sensor. Something in this range will produce an image that has a "normal" amount of compression.

However, these lenses will obviously not produce a human field of view. In fact, AFAIK, you cannot reproduce the field of view of a human eye without pretty severe distortions. Your eyes aren't rectilinear, so using very short rectilinear lenses don't really get you any closer to how a human sees. This choice is therefor aesthetic.

Re: Photography technology has influenced what people consider a good picture

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This stuff has always interested me but I've never done a deep dive into the science; do you have any recommended readings? Maybe phones will become a new arbitrary standard like 135 film was. Modern APS-C sensors and larger will be dubbed 'Large Format,' something of interest only to enthusiasts but meaningless to the average consumer.

I'm afraid not offhand, I'm a hobbyist in the area and picked up a bunch of stuff from here and there. But, "APS-C" won't become known as "large format". Those terms are already in use in photography and already hold specific meanings, even if there's some wiggle room. Micro four thirds is the smallest serious size, still far bigger than what a cell phone can have, APS-C is the consumer DSLR size, full frame matches…

Yes, I meant large format relative to phones and layusers and as a marketing gimmick, like Nikon's 'DX' line which sounds premiumly large but is actually APS-C. The filmic 'large format' needed 'medium format' to become 'large.'
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