The article covers a lot of territory but I can say from experience that the limitations to current CGI techniques mean that automation is still a ways away.

I produced all the shots for a global diaper company that is on shelf today. The pack designs were a tough format: images needed to be extremely horizontal on one side, and vertical on the reverse. But you can't just ask the photographer to shoot wide and crop in, because the new HD Flexo printing is way more hi-res. The approach at the time was to take the baby imagery and 'paint in' the extra background in Photoshop, a very time-consuming process that had to be repeated for every single image for every single region, with wildly inconsistent results. We created a replica of the on-set nursery in CGI, all the way down to matching the lighting in the C4D studio.

Yes it made the process way more flexible, yes we could localize everything with a new render, and yes we could add props or change the decor. But every render required a human eye to match the camera angles/scale of the baby shots. The uncanny valley is real, even with all the little tricks you can do to make it seem more photorealistic.

I do like the idea of AI-generated baby faces - the casting process / ethnicity requirements / rights management challenges are real. And maybe it wouldn't be all that bad if everyone knew that the babies weren't human. But the cost to develop and manage that system require real experts, a huge expense for a company that only needs baby shoots every so often. I imagine a version of 'thisbabydoesntexist' and how that would even slot into the content production workflow - it feels impossible. It's much cheaper to outsource this stuff to production companies that are smart about how they capture all the different kinds of content.

There are definitely companies where CGI makes sense to develop in-house. IKEA's approach comes to mind since they have super modular and global approach to furniture. But most companies have such a big product turnover that photography is still cheaper. Don't even get me started on hard-to-render products that require serious expertise to visualize. We tried to develop a CGI diaper but wow it was insanely complex.

I'm optimistic about the future of the space since there is so much design territory to explore in terms of workflow improvements. But I still love something real - my wife is shooting a story for a national magazine today on a local woodworking artist and I know it could never in a million years be automated. The more that computational photography advances, the more important meatspace photography will become.

I'm curious why you didn't shoot the surroundings and stitch it together into a panorama. Since you're in a studio you control the lighting. It shouldn't be hard to shoot the pictures for the panorama once and then spend most of your time shooting the baby. Any of the baby images should be able to be stitched into the rest to get a wider or taller image.

That would definitely make sense if all the shots were from the same angle.

We designed/built a nursery that could accommodate shooting from all angles so that all the different shots would look like they could be in different places. That was important because there were infants (on the changing table) to crawlers (on a blanket) all the way up to toddlers (bumbling around).

This seems like a very difficult way to do things unless you really needed to mess with items in the background.

I would think there is still plenty of room to crop a single image down from something like a new Canon 1D. Even just making a composite image if really needed sounds much easier.

That's what the photographer was shooting and it is definitely not big enough to pull back and crop in later.

The only way to get files big enough is to shoot medium format, but you can't because the files are too large for rapid-fire.

1D (XII or XIII) is 20Mpx (at 20fps), curious what resolution you're printing the actual packaging at given this isn't enough.

I've done some packaging production for a micro-business - it would be really interesting to see how it's done at a large company from taking photos through to final product.

The resolution is fine if you're in close like we were. But then you lose out on the room details which were needed the final composition, hence the CGI extension. The resolution is only a problem if you shoot pulled back and then try to crop in later.

This really sounds like a use case for an anamorphic lens. Sure, it's a bit exotic for DSLR photography. But it certainly sounds like you had the budget for it.

Could you clarify what you mean by rapid-fire? Are you talking about burst shots? What fps do you need and why?

It's not about fps, though the shutter was really fast since babies move a lot. That was hard to balance with the lighting because we couldn't fire strobes since it would freak them out.

Basically we were shooting a lot of captures really fast (but not quite burst shots) to get the perfect facial expression. Medium format camera digital back files are so huge that they can't cycle that fast. As it was, the photographer's team had to set up a system that got jpegs and RAWs at the same time: the jpegs were radioed into Capture One for immediate review, while the RAWs went to card and were imported afterwards. It was amazing to watch the team work. We had 30k captures after 5 days of shooting - it was a beast to edit down to 27 final shots.

It sounds like a memory card write speed limitation, is that correct? I've seen medium format cameras advertised with 5fps bursts (not sure on burst length), but if it takes 30 seconds between bursts to write to the memory card, that would drastically slow down the capture rate.

Exactly. The thing is, even shooting tethered with medium format, the pipe just isn't big enough to keep up and the computer and/or capture software gets bogged down, too.

When I worked in an art gallery in Union Square in SF, we had a client coming in from China to look at an original Chagall. The problem: the crate was arriving from Switzerland only an hour before the client. When it got there we raced to unpack everything. The piece was huge - the extremely ornate gold frame must have weighed 80 pounds. And there was a stray nail sticking out of it! We only had a few minutes so I laid it down flat on the floor and unscrewed the back to take out the art.

I'll never forget the feeling - when I lifted the canvas out of the frame, it was as light as air. All those millions for this piece and it could have floated out of my hands. It was a beautiful feeling I've never forgotten.

We got the nail out out of the frame, patched it up, put the art back in, and sweated through the client viewing. They bought it, of course. It wasn't even that great of a painting. But somehow the framing adds so much to the aura of the piece. It's more than an art form to be honest - for most art out there it's the one thing that adds weight. For art that is valued at whatever someone will pay for it... the framing is everything.

I sent this to several of my friends who are professional photographers and all they could say was ‘shhhh don’t give away our secrets.’

It’s all about the light. Really beautiful demonstrations.

I've been seeing a lot of that lately on Twitter: accounts post inspirational quotes/images about being an entrepreneur and 'transparency' about how much money they've made. Always followed by a link to their Gumroad: "Pay me to tell you how to take advantage of people like you, who just paid me."

Working at an agency that mostly did CPG work for P+G, I remember how so much of the design work was about catching someone's eye on shelf: how to stand out in a sea of packaging. Millions (and millions) of dollars were spent trying to crack the code.

But it's no longer a flat canvas where you can see everything all at once. The shelf is not flat, it's deep. You have to move through products one by one. In the article they say that the first spot is 'valuable.' More like 'life or death.'

I think the depth is inversely proportional to the utility of search - the better I can search for the combination of features, price, etc that I need the less deep the shelf gets. The endless generic white-labeled junk plus poor metadata really makes the problem bad though.

Okay, that sounds conspiratorial, but: is that why Amazon's search is atrociously terrible, so that they can sell the top spots for more? If you could search by attributes reliably, the top spots lose relative value.

Well I doubt they actively try to make it worse.

But I would believe it if because of the lack of incentive, they din't make active efforts to improve it.

> Get outside and talk to people in your community.

Not sure if that's the best advice given the present situation...

Asking on HN is the same (or better, given audience size) as looking around and talking to people.

It’s also not helpful to say “there’s an abundance of opportunity” without any examples.

It's not the same, because HN users don't have local knowledge. People here mention landscaping, but that wouldn't make much sense where I live, for example (lawns are relatively rare). Locality is a crucial factor in the labour market.

Network within a field you're interested in. That is much more efficient than talking to random people. ... by probably two orders of magnitude.

>The quality of the shoe you buy is the necessary determinant of how well it will perform.

Is that really true if the mind is what makes it so?

Product advertising convinces you that you can do a thing, so you succeed. Emotions are much more powerful than rational thought and in the case of the shoe, can be a catalyst for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Performance is almost never purely mechanical with products that interface directly with the human body.

Yes, it's necessarily so. The quality of the shoe determines how well the shoe performs.

Whether the customer performs better based on the (sub)conscious influence of the brand on the shoe is a different question entirely. But it's not one that anyone in these comments has provided the faintest whiff of evidence for.

So far, we've had romanticized assertions about emotional impacts nobody has measured.

The real question is whether this advertising process produces any unique benefits vs. a more product information based process. People found motivation and inspiration in things before the rise of modern branding. IMO, the presumption should be that sources of ephemeral emotional inspiration could be replaced without requiring the attention-hijacking form of advertising.

The paper uses the word 'information' throughout as some kind of agnostic store of pure facts, as if you could break down any product into a black and white description of its fundamental reality and/or benefits.

I spent several years at a respected branding firm whose primary methodology boiled down to '16 ways to poke the lizard brain.' Even if your mind mistakenly believes that it makes rational choices, there's a section of that methodology that knows just how to appeal to you.

Someone said it better than me - human psychology can't handle how good we've become at manipulating it. Advertising is the primary driver behind this, but it only exists because reality unfolds through an array of complex sensory inputs that are mostly made up of subconscious impulses.

"human psychology can't handle how good we've become at manipulating it."

I'm curious if you think there's any way we can fix this.

> A game is something that you opt into doing because you want the experience of playing it. Labeling every obstacle you run into in life, a game quickly robs the term of any meaning.

This strikes at the heart of the pernicious trend 'gamification of all the things.' Those tools have nothing to do with games and everything to do with dark patterns.

> part of playing a game is taking on a responsibility that you weren't required to take.

Gamification is the opposite - pulling you into an engagement you wouldn't otherwise choose (for better or for worse).

I disagree that voluntariness and lack of real-world relevance are very central for games.

I often find that a task that I put off for a while turns out to be fun and gamelike once I get into flow and find that the problem has interesting structure to learn.

In general, finding an appropriate level of challenge is usually the limiting factor in making a good game. Our brains love learning new patterns and making new discoveries. But most tasks are either too mundane to provide any challenge, or too difficult that we can't make progress. Even games that start out as very fun generally become boring once we master the easily learned patterns and our skill plateaus.

This is where most attempts at gamification fall flat. The problem is not that the goals are meaningful to our lives, the problem is that there's just not any interesting structure to learn, so the game feels hollow.

It's useful to remember that this story is a blog posting.

Games are tools that humans use to learn about reality by performing pattern recognition to optimize in an artificially constrained environment. This can include your own arbitrary personal constraints. Gamification of things is putting arbitrary rewards and restrictions on activities. Involvement with reality (eg Pokemon Go) is orthogonal.

I believe there are actual whitepapers on this subject (what is a game?) from decades ago.