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: dedicated photojournalists with dedicated cameras are losing ground to amateurs with just a phone and social media account.
Painting didn't die and neither will photography, but it's definitely going through some sort of midlife existential crisis. I can see it doing the equivalent of buying a vintage roadster as a senior citizen, i.e. return to its youthful state (film and mechanical/chemical processes) and explore its own unturned stones.
> 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 engineering and manufacturing, but the end result has been that “serious” photographers spend upwards of $10k on a nice body and not that much glass. You reap what you sow. All of the energy and excitement about taking pictures now surrounds phones. The idea of dropping $thousands on a “proper” DSLR setup probably seems laughable to most millennials and gen Z.
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 device.
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.
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 electron and be measured, and IIRC it already hovers at around 50% for most cameras, which means at the very best you can gather twice the amount of light before running into a wall. In photographic terms that means a maximum improvement of one f-stop.
An improvement that still could be had is a good Sigma Foveon-style sensor with stacked sensors. This in the ideal case would give you two extra f-stops (due to the lack of a bayer filter), and improve color accuracy. Foveon still doesn't perform well enough on ISO to compete well though.
So at this point we can make near perfect glass and near perfect sensors. What's left is basically playing around with the tradeoffs -- do you want to sacrifice resolution for bit depth, or bit depth for resolution? How about medium and large format? This by the way means that a big dedicated camera will always be better than a phone because it will have a bigger lens and a bigger sensor, and can do the same software tricks the phone can.
I'm sure you know more than me but I can't help but remember all the people who said 1200baud, or 9600baud the fastest the copper wires in my phone line could ever physically handle. Well, my house still has the same wires but somehow they are magically magically handling > 1gig connections.
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.
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.'
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.
Photography as art was slightly popular in the age when regular people had crappy cameras and had to learn how to create a picture. In the process people learned to appreciate good composition and artistic interpretation of true professionals.
With advancements in digital photography and recently computational exposure all of this is gone.
Over-saturation, Hyper contrast, HDRI corrections are the norm. People like things that are easy to understand and reproduce.
The next level of madness is GAS. There are thousands of "photographers" who are actually Technographers. Who are part of some "group" or brand tribe. And the taste of the tribe defines success.
The people who are learning composition, exposure or development are minority. And in this age of popularity contest photography is measured in likes, so there is no place for good photography in a classical sense.
People have phones with AI and everybody is an "artist'. So be it.
But some of us don't care. Some of us shoot film for experience and challenge. Some of us read Ansel Adams books and try to create meaningful work. Some of us know who is Bresson, Robert Capa, and countless other masters.
https://www.magnumphotos.com/shop/photographers/
And this is not bad thing.
The hobby / professional camera field has to my knowledge always been divided between technologists and artists. One group who doubled down on the technical side, and one group coming from an artistic background.
The Venn Diagram of where the two meet is not that big.
May be I cannot express my thoughts clearly.
Sorry, my English is not fluent and I don't always have enough time to polish my expose.
For me "Technographers" are not people who are on the technical side of photography.
Real technical side is important from craftsmanship perspective, but only as a tool with photography goal.
"Tecnographers" are people who care only for cameras and photographic gear in general.
They follow marketing gurus and camera reviews and participate in brand defined groups.
They are obsessed with "latest tech" and "showing off" in "Photography competitions" or "Group Meetings".
They are the most effective customers for manufacturers and in general are miles away from photography as an artistic expression or even craftsmanship.
Ah I think I know the type and what you mean! Doubling down on the sharpness of a pixel in a lens/sensor and having endless debates about it if you don’t buy the right brand.
Where I live, you can buy a very cheap tent with a rain cover for 25 USD (made in China). And I don't carry any cooking gear, so I keep things very cheap. But, yes, there are people who go crazy with "kit"!
Talking about what good and bad means in photography always reminds me of Miroslav Tichý, who said "if you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world", and took terrible but strangely brilliant photos with homemade cameras:
The imperfections serve as a kind of verfremdungseffekt, making the viewer aware that he's looking at a photograph, rather than at a person. As such René Magritte comes to mind. It is fascinating that he made his own camera, though. That certainly adds to the quality of the images, though it's of course a kind of non-diegetic contents. He said, with a wry smile.
verfremdungseffekt = distancing effect, something devised to cause you to not identify on an emotional level with the subjects or the action in the scene, but to see the image from a more dispassionate intellectual perspective. Magritte was mentioned because his work often "breaks the fourth wall," directly addressing the viewer instead of the more traditional painterly approach of creating drama in the scene.
non-diegetic content = content which is not part of the world of the scene itself. The scratches on the photos aren't part of the world that the subjects live in.
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?
Kind of taken aback by all the people saying these are just shitty photos.
I think they are gorgeous...
Do y'all think Lo-fi music is just shitty music too?
I guess its a little unsurprising coming from the usual HN crowd lmao.
I agree - the aesthetics are amazing here - uniquely stylized. It looks easy to do but I don’t think it was and to imagine this aesthetic in this medium is cool. I’d hang these.
I truly believe their are two kind of appreciators of art in the world.
1. People who like realism, photoshopped pictures, GGI in media, etc.
vs.
2. Modern art, film noir, Black & white classical movies, etc.
If you give the second a chance, you might be suprised what your imagination does. I used to be kinda a #1 guy with the exception of bad action filmed CGI movies, but completely changed as the years went by. I've even gotten to the point where I think color in film has ruined a lot of movies, along with digital.
Adding context does little to change that, unfortunately.
I could understand if they evoked some kind of emotions or served as a deconstruction of photography technique, but most of them just look like deliberately bad photographs to me.
I'd guess they invoked nostalgia in other photographers at the time about their old bad photos, so they thought it was brilliant. Like an inside thing only they understood.
For you, perhaps. I don't think there is an objective truth of "this is art, this is not art." I shared my experience of the pictures with you. Art is the experience of Art imo.
A large part of how you experience something is the context though. If people tell you something is great before showing then you are more likely to find something great about it, etc. So with that reasoning a large part of art is just telling people that it is art, it isn't the work itself but the belief that it is art that creates the art.
Context matters immensely. That’s why I can’t imagine posting an thought-provoking non-ironic short on, e.g., YouTube, knowing that it will be immediately accompanied by calls to watch 100 funniest fails and (with all my love for these creatures) wild foxes being pet or cockatoos mimicking cat meowing, and that a significant number of viewers will watch it while sitting in a toilet.
Contrasting with galleries, museums, private exhibitions surviving off subsidies or entrance fees—and I don’t think it’s as simple as “it’s just a new way of viewing that you don’t like because it’s new”—what we have settled for are “free” ad-supported platforms that are in effect much closer to casinos and malls, and to which convincing a visitor to not leave directly equals revenue.
There is, of course, this flip side, where presenting any visually unoriginal, self-gratifying, etc. work in context of an exhibition gives it not-necessarily-deserved value; and it could be that the ability to make the viewer feel something you want them to feel despite all that widely varying context is a valid skill.
That's an effect of perspective. Knowing the fact that the "home made" appearance is deliberate changes the photos from being random bad photos to being commentary.
Having seen 100s of high def birds, mountains, weddings, even pro photos are pretty repetitive.
These say interpretive art to me more than every pixel of yet another nature shot, or airbrushed person. They make my imagination curious about the world within.
When all the details are there just as they would be outside, why not just go outside?
Yup, you can't just take awful photos and say "these are good actually". Well, in the art world you can get away with that kind of nonsense. But to most people those are just terrible photos.
There are various philosophical and artistic movements for which art should not look like art. Others are about art being abstract, inaccessible and incomprehensible. Others yet are about use of archaic techniques to blend a modern eye with faux nostalgia (proto-hipsters, one could say).
There is not one kind of art.
Art does not need to be popular or broadly understood to be art.
I agree that you can’t just take awful photos and say “these are good actually,” but I think these are incredible! Haven’t enjoyed a photo series as much as these in a long time.
I suppose, as they say, there really is no accounting for taste. My own included, of course.
That holds in other art too. there is a current trend in modern art to create the most child-like, simplest, crayon crap that you can still sell at a Mega for millions lol. Very easy to make fun of but people like it.
Here's a couple that I don't actually mind too much, but still not my cup of tea.
I'm a photographer and I'll be honest, I clicked on these fully expecting to not like them (usually when people say "look at these photos, they look like terrible photos taken with a bad camera until you, like, get it, man" what they really mean is that the photographer knew the right pretentious people at the right time in history)...
... but I actually like them. I wish I could explain why; he's doing some clever stuff here. Some of it is kinda pervy and it feels like TMI, but he's at least being clever. There are a few photos that feel like you are voyeuristically peeking through time, the defects in the photos are like peeking through bushes to see something interesting. But mostly I can't explain why I like it. I just do.
I don't have a professional eye but I'll try to explain why I like one of the photos, the one identified as Photo 20, in which there are two sunbathers, the one on the right flirtatiously peering at the camera. I like the way that their images are just barely recognizable as such but they still look like real people in a candid moment. The resolution is so poor can't even see where the second woman's back ends and where the background begins. But with just a hint you can make out a smile and a sparkling eye. It's similar to the way a clever caricature captures the essence of the subject with a few strokes. Are there flowers in their hair? A checkered blanket? The mind's eye starts to fill in the details as when reading a novel. You can't make out anything clearly but it still feels there's a whole story that the viewer is being invited to share in.
I don't think I can explain to you by showing an example. Also, I type this on a phone and don't have access to my collection.
A good photo looks interesting or has something interesting in it or comes with some interesting context.
These are more or less random photos taken with a bad camera. That's it.
Now, I don't say you need good camera for good photos. You can make interesting photos with any camera. And you can also use bad camera for interesting effect.
But, again, these photos don't show any kind of plan, thought, deliberation, interesting subject, context, technique, nothing.
To each their own opinion I guess, but these photos are more than just random shots taken with a bad camera. Not all of them are especially good but there is a conscious intent of showing us the world through a slightly novel perspective and in some of the shots, with quite a visually poetic effect (the dancing feet are one good example).
Knowing the context and the work he must have put into building the camera, maintaining it and later developing his shots under the circumstances he worked with also helps. What I definitely don't see here is just a bunch of bad photos taken with a bad camera. I'd hardly call a homemade camera as simply bad, even imperfect it merits some respect.
I'd say they at least fit Susan Sontag's loose definition of photography showing others something novel.
> You don't have to like them yourself, but it seems a bit much to imply that they are objectively without value as art.
There is nothing objective about art anyway.
I agree with you, though. There is something in these. Some kind of motion. Some kind of primitive, wild instincts as well. As if a bear had found a camera, and he were more interested by ladies than about anything else.
A good photo does not need to be interesting, since it doesn't need to appeal to intellect to be good. A photo can be good just by provoking an emotional reaction in the viewer.
Just a rough translation of "Když chcete být slavní, musíte něco dělat tak blbě, že tak blbě to nikdo ve světě neudělá". "...you have to do something in such a silly manner, that nobody in the world did it so silly" or such.
You need to examine the visual history of street photography much better if this is the only silly summary you can come up with about generations of work done with all sorts of interesting concepts and themes. What an absurd, smarmy and parochial judgement of such a broad photographic field.
And how exactly is that specific context relevant to the rest of my point? Is this site saturated by people with null artistic appreciation outside an obsession with highly specific criticisms of very particular things?
It's specific to the context of discussing Miroslav Tichý's art, which is what this thread is about. Street photography is great, not sure where you mistook me
I must be out of touch, those aren’t fashionable and I don’t think most people in their 20s would think they are (sure they wear them all the time but that’s because of a rejection of fashion in favor of comfort.)
Rejection of fashion in very specific trendy ways is fashionable right now. It’s more a rejection of “runway inspired” trends than a rejection of fashion itself.
In this current internet age, there's a lot of trends of fashion. There was even a trend called normcore (https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/what-is-normcore/) that rejected typical fashion trends at that time.
Is it not art to demonstrate the capability of the designer? And what’s expected to follow is that they can put a great looking “regular” item together too
fashionable, popular, trendy, and common all mean different things even if they are somewhat interlinked concepts. High fashion then stands even more apart from the rest.
I kinda like this Cambridges definition[1] of fashionable more (even if isn't perfect)
> wearing clothes, doing things, and going to places that are considered stylish
There is clear difference of what is considered stylish and what is popular.
Macmillian[2] has even more poignant definition available:
> popular with rich and successful people, and often expensive
Which I might disagree on specifics, but it still carries the thought over. Fashionable is not (necessarily, or even commonly) popular with the common people, but of some sort of elite.
The important aspect of what.you describe is that fashion is more aspirational than popular.
A lot of what is "popular" is still recognized by the wearer themselves as not fashionable, and is worn despite that (and sometimes because of that) for various reasons.
So wear your pajamas, if comfort is the only thing that matters.
P.S. class aside, nylon is a bad choice to wear on an airplane. It melts into your skin. Cotton and leather are good choices if you want to survive an accident. Also decent lace up shoes can save your life if you need to exit a burning airplane. Try running over burning wreckage with flip-flops.
I take off my shoes for comfort when at altitude, but lace them up for takeoff and landing.
The only really interesting thing here that cameraphones have sort of pushed photography to use shorter focal lengths more often. Some photographers feel the shorter focal lengths feel "more authentic" somehow.
Other than that, this looks like someone with a smartphone trying a little too hard to "do photography" yet not bothering to travel to a nicer venue.
I love using wide angle lenses, but yes, some of them have distortion that will make people look weird. You also need to know that you have to get super close to your subject to fill the frame for a traditional portrait framing.
To check out a good example for a movie, watch The Frighteners of doing traditional close ups with wide angles. This allows for normal framing of your talent while giving lots of room in the frame for the background gags.
I'd argue that this started earlier, with the snapshot aesthetic pioneered by street photographers like Garry Winogrand and Daido Moriyama who often used wide <28mm lenses. The human field of vision is pretty wide at 120º, which equates to a ~12mm; wider is closer to what we "authentically" see. Then there's the obvious technical limitation of always being able to digitally zoom in but never out.
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 larger [1]. The shorter focal length dramatizes while also being closer to what we actually see; this wide perspective is why the two most venerable "street" cameras, the Ricoh GR and Leica Q, have fixed 28mm lenses.
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.
Hence my persistent usage of 'closer;' no camera or lens will reproduce our eyes' field-of-vision or depth-of-field or color rendition exactly, but we can approximate them to the best of our technical capacity.
Shooting wide-angle in color is aesthetically and objectively closer to what we (typically) see than a black-and-white telephoto picture.
> Shooting wide-angle in color is aesthetically and objectively closer to what we (typically) see than a black-and-white telephoto picture.
I agree about color, but not focal length. Using very short focal lengths introduces highly distracting distortions. "Normal" focal lengths (35-50mm) are closer to what we experience, despite not having the wide field of view.
Yet this experience is subjective; the cone of visual attention is a selective cocktail party effect. In an objective measure of the physical optics, wider is truer, but note that I'm not necessarily saying 'better.'
Again, I disagree with the assertion that wider is any more true to human vision, primarily since distortions are immediately apparent as the focal length gets shorter than 24mm or even 28mm. Using very short focal lengths just compresses what would otherwise be peripheral vision towards the center. This isn't somehow "more true" to human vision.
In order for such short focal lengths to truly be representative of human vision, you'd have to abandon rectilinear optics and flat media; and you'd have to graduate the level of detail such that most of the resolution was concentrated in the center rather than the periphery. If you're not willing to do so, a "normal" focal length reproducing the central vision will always be truer to human vision due to having a more reasonable perspective.
I can't tell if you're arguing for or against barrel distortion to improve accuracy, but both exist in either case [1,2].
Our attention and peripheral vision come into play also in how we consume a photograph. You will employ your peripheral vision less when you view images on your phone compared to a wall-sized print. Additionally, the longer the focal length, the more prescriptive the effect; the photographer and photograph are telling you what to look at. Wide lenses invite the photographer to work with juxtaposition and layering, and the viewer to selectively attend to different elements, which is actually in agreement with your closer-to-experience angle, i.e. the viewer must decide where to focus their cone of attention in a wide-angle photograph, just like they would in real life.
Again, I am not dealing with an absolute capital-T True representation of human vision. We are constrained to modern optical formulae and 2D mediums of commercially available photographic equipment. You could snowball this all the way into stereoscopic 3D fisheye videos livestreamed from eyewear, to get even closer to True human vision.
I still maintain that wide lenses are so useful and popular for documentary and snapshot purposes because they record more of the elements we once and will attend to; a more convincing simulacrum. It's no coincidence that 35mm and 28mm and wider are used by so many photojournalists and street/documentary photographers, often exclusively in the latter case.
> If you're using flat media and rectilinear optics, shorter lenses get progressively less and less representative of human vision.
Below ~12mm, yes. 28mm is still a compromise between field of view and usability; even with a 21mm, I have to be right in front of someone for them to fill the frame, because I would have to do the same if I were looking at them with my own eyes.
> This is always true at every focal length. Your choice of composition informs the viewer whether it's a wide angle shot or super-telephoto.
"Lately I’ve been struck with how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph." - Diane Arbus.
Photography, with its receptiveness to stream-of-conscious approach and synchronous rearing with postmodernism, is an inherently subjective medium. Joel Meyerowitz, on his use of wide angle lenses, terms the explicit look-at-this approach as 'collecting' [1]. There are subgenres dedicated to not collecting, introducing ambiguity that invites the viewer to form their own interpretation of the recorded reality.
I took a walk this afternoon and looked at a tree ~5m away. I could visualize framing the trunk of the tree with a 50 or 75mm, but also noticed a child running towards the tree. The childless telephoto perspective would've been a more accurate representation of my subjective experience of focusing on the tree, but an objectively less accurate representation of what I was actually seeing in my field of vision. A tree-only photo tells you to look at the tree, whereas a wider perspective invites you to consider the relationship between the disparate elements. Meyerowitz also waxes poetically about this [ibid].
Again, the Ricoh GR and Leica Q, the most popular dedicated street/documentary cameras, have 28mm lenses, and the Fujifilm X100 a 35mm. Essentially all of the street photographers I've met internationally use either a 28mm or 35mm most of the time. There is a visceral you-are-right-there-in-the-moment feeling from looking at a wide angle photograph, especially when printed large, that simply cannot be reproduced with a normal-telephoto.
And yet, as I've argued with objective statements re: field of view and subjective experience from others and myself, we use these wide angles because they are objectively and subjectively closer to matching our human vision.
Once you get to a certain level, you can begin to make choices that invites the viewer to make a choice, and realize that your choices are only ever second to theirs. Wider lenses are more effective at this specifically because they gather more elements in the frame, inducing more ambiguity and opportunity for alternative interpretations, just like how we always have to decide where our cone of attention points.
Stopping short of advising you to touch grass, I'd invite you to shoot exclusively with wides and fisheyes for a while, and practice soft focus for peripheral awareness [1]. Apart from that, no argumentation on photography through the limited medium of text is going to reconcile our perspectives.
Except due to distortions and perspective differences, shorter focal lengths are objectively further from matching human vision.
Subjects regularly look much further from the camera than they actually are. Objects at the edge of the frame are weirdly stretched. Whatever is closest to the camera will appear disproportionately large in your final image. Objects in the background are disproportionately small.
Not to mention barrel distortions tend to be much more prominent as focal length is shortened.
Normal focal lengths are the closest to human vision. Wide angle fisheye lenses could be ok with curved media, but otherwise they're just warped.
Considering the area of focus of human vision, along with the fact that we don't see in rectilinear terms, trying to reduce all the aspects of human vision to one factor: field of view... seems foolish at best.
If we viewed photos in some kind of spherical VR space or on curved media, then wider field of view with a fisheye lens could be argued to be more similar to human vision. However, we almost exclusively view pictures as flat sheets of paper or flat rectangular screens.
For those reasons and others, 35-50mm is far more similar to actual human vision.
Composition (and thus the number of elements in frame) is a choice that gets made by the photographer, and can be achieved by altering the scene, changing distance, or changing focal length. Having more or fewer elements in frame has nothing to do with mimicking human vision, and whatever focal length you've chosen is a decision you're making for the viewer. If you make a 360° photo, that's still a composition decision you're making on behalf of the viewer, and it directly effects how they consume your work.
Now, if you want your image to be a wider angle, that's fine. That is a legitimate compositional choice... but it is a choice that you the photographer are making. It's not better or worse. Nor is trying to be "closer to human vision" inherently better or worse than any other choice. Knock yourself out with whatever focal lengths suit you.
>Not to mention barrel distortions tend to be much more prominent as focal length is shortened.
>Considering the area of focus of human vision, along with the fact that we don't see in rectilinear terms, trying to reduce all the aspects of human vision to one factor: field of view... seems foolish at best.
If you can cherrypick to distortion, I can cherry pick to compositional element-gathering ability, of which a wide field of view is objectively better at, and which is actually more important to documentation-oriented photographers. To revisit the impetus for this conversation:
>Considering the area of focus of human vision, along with the fact that we don't see in rectilinear terms, trying to reduce all the aspects of human vision to one factor: field of view... seems foolish at best.
The wideness is precisely why practiced documentary photographers/photojournalists choose 28-35mm for their more authentic representation; it is a better representation of the messiness of the world that takes a trained eye to organize. Empirically and experientially, experienced portrait photographers will use normals and telephotos for pleasing-yet-detached proportions, and experienced street/snapshot photographers will continue using wides for the authentic drop-the-viewer-in-the-world effect. To say that they should actually be using 50mm is... foolish at best. When someone pays me for portraits, I will use a 50-75mm, but when I want to remember what it was like to be somewhere doing something and living, I and many others will use a 28mm or 35mm.
I will now go photograph grass with a 28mm and you should too.
I'm cherrypicking to perspective. Distortion is an additional argument, alongside field of view of the area of focus, etc.
> documentary photographers/photojournalists choose 28-35mm for their more authentic representation
I dispute the idea that there is anything like a uniformity of choices, and I dispute the idea that documentary photographers choose a focal length for authenticity purposes. If you're doing a documentary and especially if you're doing photojournalism, you're choosing focal lengths that properly frame your subject at whatever distance you need to stand at... because often you won't be able to choose your distance to the subject.
This fstoppers article suggests that the two most useful photojournalism lenses are a 24-70mm zoom, and an 85mm portrait lens.
Other articles seem to suggest that photojournalists should carry zoom lenses covering a range from 12 or 16mm to 200mm, which makes perfect sense.
I see no indication that 28-35mm is preferred.
> To say that they should actually be using 50mm is... foolish at best.
Then don't say that. What does this statement have to do with this conversation?
> When someone pays me for portraits, I will use a 50-75mm, but when I want to remember what it was like to be somewhere doing something and living, I and many others will use a 28mm or 35mm.
And that's fine. You can use whatever focal lengths you want to evoke different emotions. That's one of the reasons we don't just use one lens or one focal length all the time.
This isn't really relevant to the assertion that short focal lengths are somehow closer to human vision.
>I dispute the idea that there is anything like a uniformity of choices, and I dispute the idea that documentary photographers choose a focal length for authenticity purposes.
Documentation: the act or an instance of furnishing or authenticating with documents [Merriam-Webster]. Documentary photographers are thus by definition chiefly concerned with representing events as authentically as they happened.
I've done several years of work as a photojournalist [1-3]. Of the other photojournalists I've bumped into, the wide-normal zoom or a 24/28mm prime gets used most of the time. Barring logistical mandates, only amateurs aren't able to choose their distance to the subject and rely solely on telephotos; more experienced PJs know how to get close. “If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough” - Robert Capa.
I also do a lot of personal street/documentary work and have shot around prominent photo circles in Japan and New York [4,5]. As I've said repeatedly, the most popular cameras in this genre (Ricoh GR, Leica Q, Fuji X100) sport fixed, i.e. unchangeable, 28mm or 35mm lenses. Many of those who shoot on Leicas, whose system lenses are so expensive you can only have a few, often choose either a 28mm or 35mm. It's a running joke within New York specifically that you don't shoot street unless it's with a Leica M6 and 28mm.
> Then don't say that. What does this statement have to do with this conversation?
With regards to documentary photography, which is trying to portray things as authentically as they happen, by your standards, normal lenses would be the principle option because of the distortionless proportional perspective, but this is empirically not the case.
I think we're on different levels of experience here, and I will sign off this conversation as I advise again: go photograph grass with a 28mm.
> I've done several years of work as a photojournalist [1-3]
This is an anecdote, and even if accepted it doesn't do anything show uniformity.
You have chosen short focal lengths. That's fine.
> With regards to documentary photography, which is trying to portray things as authentically as they happen, by your standards, normal lenses would be the principle option because of the distortionless proportional perspective, but this is empirically not the case.
It's hard to say. But I've been a fan of Juregen Teller for a while. He wants to break all the "rules" of fashion photography and photography in general.
You're right, if you post these anonymously to IG, no one would bat an eye. But it's published in a prominent fashion magazine, it's taken by the famous Juregen Teller, it features celebrities posing in an unflattering way, they're wearing the latest designer clothes, and it got a ton of negative attention on Twitter and other social media (all attention is good attention).
A typical amateur won't be able to do that (they probably think they can). I consider his style to be real and "amateurish" in a deliberate way. In some ways, I feel he's parodying amateur photos and putting famous celebrities in situations that normal pros don't usually would or can. Here is another site that tries to describe it: https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/juergen-teller-w-magazine/
I didn't find the photos necessarily bad or easy to replicate at all. Taking pictures of people is intimate and challenging thing to do, especially if you don't know them well.
I'm also not one to critique photos from a technical perspective, and tend to go by feel in my own and others photos.
I'm similar. Critiquing a photo from a technical perspective is the low-effort way to do it. Getting a technically good photo is probably the easiest thing to do.
When I was more serious into photography back in the day, getting a photo that can express what I wanted it to feel or the story I wanted to convey was much harder.
That used to take skill, before autofocus and digital cameras able to shoot at ISO 6400+ with post-processing to smooth out the noise. Now we're at a point where if the picture our phone takes is out-of-focus and too dark, we blame the phone.
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.
Yes the craft of photography has gone mainstream with digital.
Easier to use for the average person, with filters and effects, but doesn't make the average users professionals.
Mobile phone images are the new throwaway polaroid.
However, the professionals with digital equipment do some incredible things.
The business of photography is more marketing than craft these days. Even professional photography is a commodity.
There are some people that stretch the art of photography, but they are more digital artists than photographers. They take a lot of the creativity into the post-processing and Photoshop stage. Most professional photography these days is just right-place-right-time and tweaking in Lightroom.
It's worth noting that even quite famous photographers from before the digital era would spend a LOT of time doing post-processing in the darkroom.
I'm thinking specifically of Ansel Adams, who famously said “You don't take a photograph, you make it.”
Of course darkroom tools had to be supplemented with special techniques and filters applied at the time of exposure. Digital photography is orders of magnitude easier.
Great quote. I meant to imply that post-processing is a plus. A good percentage of people still think post-processing is cheating (i.e., #nofilter) but it's where the creativity actually comes into play.
The hard thing about digital photography is that it's easier, but that means you have to be that much better to stand out, because it's easier for everyone.
I have to guess a little at what you mean. My guess is the word "fix", having only been tangentially involved with photography are these the chemicals that we now call "fixer"?
That is actually done by the developer. The fixer washes away the remaining unexposed silver ions that were not reduced to metallic silver by the developer.
The fixer stabilises the image, removing the unexposed silver halide remaining on the photographic film or photographic paper, leaving behind the reduced metallic silver that forms the image
My most upvoted reddit comment ever was when I posted a "Sacagawea selfie"... by sticking my camera at the end of a statue's arm: https://i.imgur.com/UXRUx8q.jpeg
The caption says, somewhat ambiguously, "Example of a selfie".
That could mean "this image is an example of a selfie" (which is false). Alternatively it could mean "this image shows an example of a selfie being taken" (which is true).
EDIT: If you don't want to wade through that thread, here's a single image strip of that OP descending into madness as he shows how he took the "k-1" photo: https://i.imgur.com/Z12CC.jpg
Sure but they are showing someone who we can presume completed taking a selfie. Though, arguably, the photographer we do not see, being further away would have taken a better (less distorted) picture, if the self photographer hadn’t hogged up the view.
In any case, I’d be curious to have joerg colberg’s take on this. Looks like he touches upon it tangentially[1] but not full on.
I have heard that as well, but the selfie in those cases was them with whatever they said. So it is more a short form of "took a photo of me with..." which I think is OK.
Or, a deeply-rooted assumption that "conformance to some arbitrary rules that have been adopted as signifiers of intelligence and class" is in some way an admirable quality, rather than the abilities to infer meaning in the face of ambiguity and to update one's mental model in response to new information (also known as "intelligence")
Take "miles per hour" for example. I've met plenty of people who can't figure out how long it would take to get from A to B at X mph. They'll deliberate over how they know from running on their treadmill that they run (on average) at 8 mph, and they recall that it usually takes them Y minutes to run Z miles, and then they factor in the diameter of their car's wheels (because surely a car with larger wheels gets there faster for the same mph vs a car with smaller wheels), and finally sprinkle in a bit of multiplication to arrive at their best guestimate.
That is, plenty of people don't realize that "per" means "for each", and that it's not some singular word "milesperhour", but a phrase meaning "miles traveled for every hour spent travelling".
Other fun phrases thrown around without understanding (or with similar words mistakenly swapped in):
If you are disheartened by your photography then constrain yourself to people only. Once you have learned how to talk to your subjects, to get real emotion out of them, then you’ll never look back. Break through that say-cheese barrier and make eye contact. Get people to really look at you and trust you, know when they are ready, and get them to show you how they feel.
I used to pat myself on the back for artsy seashell misty forest autumn leaf postcard stuff. In a world of hyper technical gear none of that is exceptional any more.
The composition and lighting of people and their faces is all.
I recently started making photographic images with pinhole lenses exposing directly to photo paper. It certainly changed what I pursued as 'good' photograph. To even think about composition, texture, tone, subject you first have to get past the difficulty, and ease of making mistakes in the technical process. It certainly gave me great respect for people who make art photography in the pre-digital era.
A large part of my motivation for trying this was looking at all everyone (myself included) snapping away all day every day making photos .. for what? .. It was hard to not just see them as habitual Trojan metadata carriers.
Something I've notice the past few years is how annoying it is to look at small highly compressed images. You can go to http://news.google.com and look at the thumbnails to get an idea of what I mean. Part of it is that pictures for digital consumption are taken with the belief that they'll be viewed at high resolution, and part of it is that the images are heavily compressed. It's not just that the detail is gone, but it's replaced with the vague hint of something. Sometimes I feel like I'm looking at GAN generated imagery because my brain is telling me there's something there, but I can't make out what it is.
For whatever if anything it might be worth, I would recommend Beil’s book if you find the ideas in the article interesting.
I mean the American Method is still running round in photographic circles as obsession with corner sharpness as a marker of self seriousness…and that’s where the book starts.
If I had an unmet need, it is the entirety American focus of the book leaves me a bit blind to the bigger picture. What was it like, I wonder, in Japan?
But then again, good books should raise new questions because new questions are the mark of learning. Beil’s book certainly feels like a potentially “important book” on US photographic history to me. YMMV.
As a bonus, Halide also gives you proper control over which lens is being used in 2x mode - the iOS camera will flip between the 1x lens and 2x lens for 2x depending on focal distance - makes a right mess of things if you've got an extension lens screwed into 2x...
All camera phones do heavy processing of the captured pixels. This is known as "computational photography". The camera software is the only thing that keeps the average camera phone picture in the realm of "that's a picture of the thing I meant to take a picture of".
Movies and TV have a much bigger impact on this than ads. Ads in general are worse at changing opinions than most people think. They are better at getting people to act on what they already agree with.
> “We have a situation today,” Beil says, “in which our smartphone cameras are producing pictures according to the criteria of software designers, who have made a lot of egregious assumptions about the tonality of skin color.”
Making any such assumption, of any quality, is egregious; it has no place in the camera application, other than as some opt-in configuration in the category of special effects.
I believe you have to make assumptions. AFAIK the data being picked up by the sensor can't map 1 to 1 with a display screen or a jpg or a print. So there has to be some mapping involved. Some cameras will give a RAW file, but developing a raw file isn't really a special effect.
I think there is a difference between applying some gamma curve or removing noise or whatever, versus somewhat understanding the image semantics and going after fixing skin tones.
I don't think this is a good title for the article. It probably generates more clicks than "how trends and technology influenced our perception photographs."
I'm no art historian, but from one point of view, good photography demonstrated qualities you'd find in good painting. Then the medium took on its own aesthetic with camera angles or color saturation of various films. Fast forward to today and between "vertical" compositions (screen orientation) and live photo (very short video) and let's face it, upvoting, our world is less about bad photos than it is about popular photos. From a collector's point of view, I'd think one would align with that more than, say, a contest winner's photo. And, an element of this has always been there, just not as amplified and dominant as it is in this social media era.
@chefandy suggested a better title, and I'd agree. I'd suggest however that his/her title is too gentle. I'd say "How Mass Popularity and Tech Influenced Perception of Photography" because it speaks to the culturally aggregating effect of the Internet.
"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: dedicated photojournalists with dedicated cameras are losing ground to amateurs with just a phone and social media account.
Painting didn't die and neither will photography, but it's definitely going through some sort of midlife existential crisis. I can see it doing the equivalent of buying a vintage roadster as a senior citizen, i.e. return to its youthful state (film and mechanical/chemical processes) and explore its own unturned stones.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ezzpuOqkX4