I've never owned an Apple device. I don't take photographs or video with my phone very often. But this video presentation was captivating. It was clear, concise, without any nonsense, and thoroughly interesting.
The guy in the video is Stu, not only does he have an impressive resume (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0556179/ known for originality, e.g. he did Sin City's look), he is also the original author of MagicBullet, which is one of the most used software by people in the industry to do easy color work. If there's one person who knows about color work, LUTs in creative work, color encoding systems, etc., it's him so naturally he knows how to present relevant subject matter without nonsense.
> If there's one person who knows about [thing] it's him so naturally he knows how to present relevant subject matter
One lesson (no pun intended) of the academic environment is that no, it doesn’t work that way. Some people are subject-matter experts, some are brilliant expositors, but while you can’t be a good expositor without a decent knowledge of the subject matter, you absolutely can be a world-leading scientist and at the same time completely rubbish at explaining your ideas. (Some areas are better at making use of such people than others.)
Good exposition deserves additional credit on top of subject expertise, is what I’m trying to say.
I mean, you’re not wrong :P even if I’d probably put this as: Why not stay silent if you don’t have anything to add?
This particular topic, though, I do feel more strongly about than most I comment on here.
Technical exposition is an underappreciated art, and in many places an unrewarded one. How many star technical writers can you name, compared to star programmers? How much effort does writing a good review paper take, compared to an incremental research advance, and how much harder is it to publish one?
Halmos, one of the best expositors of (non-popular!) mathematics in at least a generation, quotes an anonymous mathematician in How to write mathematics: “All of us, I think, feel secretly that if we but bothered we could be really first-rate expositors”; the mathematician’s point being that nothing could be further from the truth. (Incidentally, it’s a bit startling how well Halmos’s principles map to the ones in Vonnegut’s How to write with style.)
I’m sensitive about this in part because I myself want to be good at exposition and never feel that I actually am. Still, personal hangups aside, if the guy is an expert and can communicate, with no tradeoff on either side, that’s rare enough—and must have needed work enough—that it should be celebrated.
This also means that you will often find excellent easily digestible expositions of ideas from people who don't have a good grasp of the subject matter, which is problematic.
oh thx for sharing his background. this highlights something that i repeatedly find so frustrating.
this guy knows what he’s talking about. he has authority in his field. he has proven both theoretically and materially that his wisdom is high quality.
yet, videos from people with far less expertise on the subject matter will likely drown his out. over and over again i’ve seen the top videos on so many subjects repeating just plain wrong information but the “creator” says it with confidence so people just eat it up. even worse, so many times i’ve seen people in the comments try to nicely point out where the “creator” went wrong, and people go after the commenter for daring to imply this person on the magic screen might be misinformed.
it’s such a shame that being higher in the search says almost nothing about your knowledge on a subject and only means you’re better at manipulating the algorithm rather than having actual higher quality information.
i really wish that our searches would prioritize quality of information. at this point, years later, i think it’s pretty clear that the “wisdom of the crowd will shoot the highest quality to the top” has been proven to not be the case.
also, i don’t want to imply that amateurs can’t have valid and interesting perspectives, sometimes they might, just that being higher in search means quite literally nothing on wisdom of a subject—especially if a grifter can monetize off a trendy nuanced subject.
anyway, this video was incredible information. thx for sharing his background.
Except much of the alt media ecosystem of grifters and influencers are precisely providing people what they want to hear and raise massive amounts of money doing so. They oftentimes do not think they’re grifters because they feel they are responding to a “market need” and so they are providing a service even if they might not even agree ethically with the output necessarily. This is how we wind up with so many conspiracy theorist nutjobs dominating recommendation algorithms again and again across many different platforms. People are highly, highly fallible and what they want may be, in fact, some of the worst things for them. As such I’m convinced that most adults are only physically and legally that way given how incredibly naive and immature people appear to be as a baseline regardless of cultural or even educational background.
IMHO, it's the monopoly aspect that really jumped the shark.
Google as one among competitors (read: pre-Android/~2005) still had to be a useful enough search engine to attract users.
Once their search share attained hegemony, user satisfaction deprioritized (relatively) and revenue was allowed to dominate.
And thus, we now get a Google who has little interest in weeding out SEO'd spam. (And not as in 'tweaking their algorithm' -- as in fundamentally detecting and delisting all recipe-story porn and answer-mills)
Google had the same issue pre-monopoly. Since its early history it’s been trying to show users what other users like. “Correctness” was never part of the equation because search engines that paid deference to authority all sucked.
You can easily start a search engine using a different model. You’re going to struggle to compete with anything that prioritizes what users find popular.
The problem isn't that it is free. The problem is that it is funded by ads. Ads are a disincentive to providing useful information. That is fundamentally what an ad is. Someone paying to spread disinformation.
> That is fundamentally what an ad is. Someone paying to spread disinformation.
So when I see an add for say Kenwood's latest radios in QST magazine, what would be the disinformation being spread? Or an ad for House of Staunton chess sets in Chess Life magazine?
They are presenting a perspective that is designed to not only present the product in the best light, but also to convince you that you should purchase it (whether that is true or not).
I think disinformation probably implies a level in malice that is not present (or rather, present in consumerist systems by default, and not specific to advertisers), but obviously trying to convince someone to purchase something which it might actually not be good for them to buy, is misinforming them.
If a friend told you to buy a product and you did and it sucked, you'd be upset at them. But when a company does it with an ad, no one gets upset, because we understand that ads are lying to us.
We don't expect that they're being honest.
Or put another way, we expect that they are misinforming us about our need for, and appreciation of, the product.
First, I (and many people that I know) do get upset when an ad misrepresents a product and we get burned. It happens all the time, and people complain about it constantly. You might argue this is wasted breath, but it still happens.
I would also say that while everyone accepts that ads are at a high risk for dishonesty, the vast majority of people live their lives assuming that ads convey some useful information, even if it's just the vague intent and target audience of the product. It's easy to pick out specific genres of ads that don't seem to do this, and ad rhetoric can often be complicated and interesting, but generally speaking they do try to convey some sort of genuine information about the product.
Saying that ads are fundamentally misinformation people because they are "obviously trying to convince someone to purchase something which might actually not be good for them to buy" seems like a reasonable criticism at first glance, but actually I think that's kind of a ridiculous standard. No one except my closest friends and family have any idea what might be "good for me to buy", and I am not so against the idea of basic commerce that I think it's useful to say that someone hawking their wares is "misinforming" the public simply because they're trying to sell to strangers.
This is not to say that the ad industry isn't infested with slimy people with perverse incentives. Of course it is. But advertising itself is a basic extension of human communication, and I think it's awfully cynical to say that any attempt to show someone why they might want to buy your product is spreading misinformation. I do believe that it's okay to advocate for something, and then let people decide for themselves if they agree. If it's not, then nearly all human discourse is an exercise in misinformation.
(Inb4 "actually, nearly all human discourse is misinformation")
There is a massive gap between a vendor hawking their wares on the street, and modern ad campaigns and techniques.
To conflate those 2 as being remotely similar in levels of influence (even at an individual level) is insane.
Also, I'm not sure why you jumped to assuming that I apparently believe advertising shouldn't be allowed, just because I can acknowledge that it is based entirely on selfish intent by the ad creators?
All I said was that ads are a form of misinformation. You're the one drawing conclusions about what responses that must entail.
If you prefer to pretend it's not misinformation just because you apparently cannot reconcile that stance, and allowing ads to continue to exist, that's a "you" problem.
You said that ads are misinformation because they try to convince you to buy something that may or may not be in your best interest to buy. My response to this is that's a ridiculous definition of "misinformation," and I disagree with it strongly.
You said nothing about levels of influence, or about modern ad campaigns versus word-of-mouth advertising, or anything of the like. I couldn't have responded to these things even if I wanted to, because you didn't say them. All you said was that selfish motivation == misinformation, and that's wrong, and I disagree with it.
Of course I suspected that you wrote your comment because of angst against the manipulations of "modern ad campaigns," and not because you believe that's actually a useful definition of misinformation, and you just proved it for me. You're trying to redefine words so you can use those words to give your point more oomph.
I also said nothing about you believing advertising shouldn't be allowed. Why do you think I said this? I didn't even imply it. I only said I thought you were being cynical.
It's true that there's a massive gap between a vendor hawking their wares on the street and "modern ad campaigns and techniques." There is also an entire gradient between these two things, and you see examples all along this gradient if you actually pay attention to advertising. The existence of this gradient is why I take issue with your original comment.
> All you said was that selfish motivation == misinformation
No I didn't, even according to you:
> You said that ads are misinformation because they try to convince you to buy something that may or may not be in your best interest to buy
Correct. Which is true if the thing they say you should buy, you should not in fact buy.
> that's a ridiculous definition of "misinformation," and I disagree with it strongly
You don't like that definition because you don't think that pressuring someone to buy something, when you have a vested interest in that thing selling, is inherently wrong. Not everyone has to have the same opinions about business rights and ethics as you.
> You said nothing about levels of influence, or about modern ad campaigns versus word-of-mouth advertising, or anything of the like.
No, you brought that into the conversation:
> I am not so against the idea of basic commerce that I think it's useful to say that someone hawking their wares is "misinforming"
Before that, we were clearly talking about modern ads, not "someone hawking their wares" as part of "basic commerce", which is obviously far more expansive a discussion, and includes said individual sellers.
> not because you believe that's actually a useful definition of misinformation
I am not limiting "misinformation" to only that, I am including that within the umbrella of misinformation, because it is.
Misinformation is simply, "Untrue or incorrect information." You are the one trying to redefine it to exclude common forms of misinformation we're used to navigating.
> I also said nothing about you believing advertising shouldn't be allowed.
Not explicitly. What you said was
> "I do believe that it's okay to advocate for something, and then let people decide for themselves if they agree. If it's not..."
Which is an inherent implication that I do not think it's okay to do so. I do think it's okay, I just can acknowledge that it's usually misinformation. As I said, the issue here is you being unable to reconcile something being misinformation, and that thing still being allowed.
I have a very strong distaste for our based future, but saying ads are “paying to spread disinformation” is like saying joining the army is only for people who want to murder other humans.
There’s an element of truth, but it is way too reductive. Are you of the mind that word of mouth is the only moral way to grow a business?
Yeah this frustrates me too. I also see this when say HN or Reddit is talking about a topic I know very deeply. People say incorrect stuff often in those situations, and it makes me think most situations we are spreading incorrect information.
If I'm talking to a non-educated (in the subject matter) audience, I'll often aim for "correct enough" and people saying "well actually" is super annoying and confusing to everyone involved. There is always more to learn, and you can always go deeper into a subject, that doesn't mean everyone around you wants to go down that rabbit hole too; like 'cool flex bro.'
As a counterpoint, the number of folks teaching ‘accessible’ information that sounds good, and may even be plausibly kinda correct - but is actually harmful to understanding what is actually happening. Or ancient aliens (as a ‘theory’). Which is rife.
The AI generated content on YouTube is often 80% right, as is human generated by some channels, and sounds very plausible (and is sometimes very hard to identify!) - but is presenting hallucinated facts as reality for the other 20%. Quite convincingly too.
It’s in almost all topics now, from the Ukraine War to cooking.
And ancient aliens type stuff is all over the place - UFOs, pyramids, gov’t conspiracies of various forms, etc.
Not just YouTube of course, but very visible there.
Agreed, though I will say on HN there are usually (nearly always) people on that are correcting the misinformation. Sometimes their voices are drowned out by down voters who vote on emotion or a sea of spouters, but at least there is good discussion. Compared to Reddit and other places, it's amazing.
I'm glad to know that the person behind this post have real expertise, because at first glance the headline is a bit clickbait-like. (The content, though, makes excellent points.)
Also the author of the excellent DV Rebel’s Guide book which was an indie film makers bible for a long time. Obviously the title gives away its age though.
Well, there was one bit of nonsense and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm referring to the Ren & Stimpy "Log Song" sound track to the video of the woman walking up the stairs:
I don’t know if it’s the same thing, but capture on my Nikon D7100 always felt more “manipulable” than capture on an iPhone or the like, I suspected as a downstream effect of using RAW format with a larger image sensor. Interpreting log through this understanding, it felt pretty intuitive reading through this post. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but it feels accurate…
One reason is also that phone cameras have many limitations, so to get good images they have to "cheat" to work around those limitations. Additionally they often apply filters to the images so it looks good "out of the box", like contrast, smoothing, sharpening. Those choices done for you mean you lose information to do better yourself.
Which is a great if you consider that 99.98% of iphone owners wont know how to do it better themselves.
It will be fascinating for anthropologists a few hundred years from now to see the increase in quality in «every day photography» that came with the increasing quality of smartphone camera software.
I actually think what’s happening is that it’s averaging out photography with such amazing tools in everyone’s hands, however we are seeing an outlier explosion of creative photography that we haven’t seen before.
That said, the dopamine hit comes from taking your own shots and seeing the visual perfectness Apple creates, rarely if ever will those shots give the same effect to a viewer. So they don’t need to be photography-perfect, they just need to appeal enough to our monkey brains and monkey eyes to get that shot of dopamine to want us to take more pictures, therefore using the phone and resulting cloud storage more.
The magic of phone cameras disappears in a moment when you get hold of a mirrorless for 5 minutes. Even a bottom end one is orders of magnitude better than the best phone camera even if it’s got a lot less megapixels.
I love my mirrorless, but it certainly wasn't 5 minutes. The first two lenses I tried (cheap ones obviously) were pretty underwhelming. Once I got a large aperture lens, I started to really get it. Even then, so many of my photos came out dark or blurry because I hadn't learned how to pick settings or focus for different lighting conditions and subject movement speeds. Autofocus on consumer cameras is pretty trash compared to iPhone/Pixel. EyeAF my ass.
These camera companies need to invest more in their software. Superzoom, night sight, subject tracking and smart autofocus should be table stakes. Auto mode on my mirrorless should at least be on par out of the box with my phone. It's sad that the pixel phones with very old Sony sensors can take better 10x pictures than mirrorless out of the box. They need to worry less about better lenses and sensors, and worry more about better onboard compute capabilities.
Lenses make SUCH a difference. A family member asked me to shoot their wedding (no pressure, right?) and since without me it wouldn’t have happened, I agreed. I also rented some L glass for my SLRs, and holy shit was that eye-opening. Turns out that a $2000 lens is objectively better than a $300 lens, who knew?
The clarity, the sharpness, the pop - everything was improved. Good glass is a bigger difference than the body.
This is also introducing the difference between zoom lenses and prime lenses. You can get a good 28mm lens for much less cost than a good 24-70mm zoom lens. Most novices in photography don't start nowadays with good prime lenses, but with cheap zoom lenses.
Great! Inexpensive zoom lenses are getting better all the time. And manufacturing processes are likely also improving. The gap is narrowing.
But, at least today, you still get enhanced features on the more expensive zoom lens, such as wider aperture, and a constant maximum aperture across the entire zoom range. Neither of those things necessarily yields a superior photograph -- you don't need f2.8 across the whole zoom range if you're taking pictures at f6 -- but they can be very helpful. If they're worth paying for depends on one's personal needs, desires, and budget.
>A $300 lens is objectively better than a $5 smartphone lens.
Not sure where you are getting the $5 figure from. In any case, smartphone lenses are manufactured in vastly higher quantities than lenses for interchangeable lens cameras, so it doesn't make sense to compare the per unit cost. Modern smartphone lenses are miracles of optical engineering. See e.g. https://qht.co/item?id=30557578 The cost of the R&D that's gone into enabling their design and manufacture probably couldn't have been recuperated if they were being used only in cameras.
Fair enough; perhaps it’s fair to say that given a specific application or lens type, a more expensive one will generally be better than a cheaper one. For example, you can get any prime or zoom you want from Canon as a normal or L variety. The latter will cost about 10x as much, and will be better. 10x better is subjective.
On the flip side, my favorite macro was a Sigma 105mm prime. Tack-sharp, and cost well under $1000. Of course, I’ve never shot with the equivalent Canon L (which isn’t quite the same at 100mm, but close).
* wider f-stop
* less chromatic aberration
* less distortion generally
* smaller circle of confusion
The chromatic aberration is an important but subtle effect. Remember that lenses are multiple pieces of glass, and every interface diffracts the wavelengths of light like a prism. One of the considerations in lens design is converging all those different wavelengths of light in the same place. Not just at one point, but at every point across the image plane.
Poor lenses might do the well in an area. Good lenses do it everywhere.
Sorry, should have clarified. The lens in particular that made me rethink everything else I had was a 70-200mm f/2.8L. Zooms in particular often suffer from sharpness and chromatic aberration issues compared to a prime due to the larger number of optics. This lens did not. I’m sure a comparable prime stuck next to it would still show it up, but coming from kit zoom lenses, it was quite a shocking difference.
The static aperture also helps tremendously of course, yes - nice bokeh with a tight zoom means you can easily get candid portraits that look great from anywhere in the room.
70-200 f2.8 L IS III is the Bentley of lenses, the Aston Martin, the Maybach, etc. you got the best hardware possible for the job. for the price it better be amazing! even the older ones without IS are excellent.
L glass is also a very interesting used market - those things basically don't lose value IME.
It was the IS II at the time, but yes - an absolutely spectacular piece of kit. I think it was about $100 to rent for the weekend? Very reasonable IMO, and made me realize that one could quite easily bootstrap a wedding photography business without actually owning gear.
Other than the actual business side of things, pesky details like getting clients. And the massive stress of shooting a wedding. I was happy to do it gratis for family, but I don’t think I’d want to deal with paying clients.
When I was still shooting Canon, I used a 70-200mm f/4L which I picked up for a song (C$~600 sixteen years ago?). Not the beauty of a 2.8, but having a consistent 4 made for some beautiful shots on Cape Breton.
Lenses affect color contrast too. I don't fully grasp it but internal reflections adding neutral white bias or correction tradeoffs between geometry and color or something. Aperture can be widened as much as lens barrel allows so that isn't it.
I feel the same comparing my iphone and mirrorless. It's obvious software is years behind in almost every aspect; even relatively easy fixes like the horrible designed and unintuitive UI choices where the same mistakes are made year after year despite complaints...ugh! The last thing I need when taking pictures is fumbling around in 5 layers of menus to change important settings while my subject moves on and the moment has past. It almost feels on purpose as if the though is that added complexity is some proxy for it being "professional"
If processing power is one of the bottleneck to get some of the features phones can do it would be great if there was a universal hotshoe-like way to mount phones to camera bodies to use the screen, touch capabilities, and offload processing power, maybe with all phones now having USB-C its more of a possibility. If the camera makers don't do it I wouldn't be surprised if Apple/Google eventually do and eat their lunch.
> relatively easy fixes like the horrible designed and unintuitive UI choices where the same mistakes are made year after year despite complaints...ugh!
This is exactly the complaint I have about car manufacturers not having enough / the “right” digital UX experience.
The micro 4/3 M.Zuiko 45mm 1.8 is the bees knees - but the process of getting a useful shot into my family icloud album is so much work I rarely pull it out. Mirrorless really should be bodies with sensors and a thunderbolt connection to a smartphone.
Affinity Photo will let you export an image into the Photo library directly from the editor. I use it to do minimal edits (a bit of crop, exposure, maybe highlights/shadows) and then go File > Share > Add to Photos. It's a great workflow for a hobby photographer like me and I like that it is a perpetual license. Adobe products will let a pro fly through hundreds of images a day, but this is more than enough for quick edits and dumping the files into iCloud.
They offer a free trial, try it out! (I am not affiliated, just a happy user)
I bought a $1200 mirrorless which was supposedly the best in class a couple of years ago. All my photos look like they were shot on a potato compared to my iphone.
Not to mention that I don't walk around with that mirrorless camera in my pocket at almost all times.
I once asked someone with a nice piece of kit that wasn't too far from mine in cost. They said they sorted top to bottom on DxOMark list and bought one on the top and they didn't even know what a prime is. But that approach seemed to work.
How much did you spend on the lens that went on it?
Camera bodies will keep being updated. Glass is updated, but a lot more stable.
If I have a friend who wants to invest, say, $3,000 in a camera setup, I'd tell them to get a $1,000 body and $2,000 of lenses. A couple have thought they'd buy a $2,500 body and $500 lens, and I explained why they might be disappointed with that investment.
I agree but for the average user who takes sunset pics, kid pics or pet pics and then view those pictures on the same device they shot it on, apple’s incentive isn’t so much about competing with full-frame mirrorless cameras, but instead to make the pictures shot on the iPhone look as good as possible on the iPhone. That way, the shooter gets the dopamine hit when they shoot something that triggers our visual sense in a positive way.
My Sony a7iv gives me the same dopamine hit, maybe more so as there’s no better feeling than getting home, loading your footage into DaVinci and see that your exposure, focus and colours are nailed (on the other side of the coin, it’s a huge punch in the gut to get home and see your focus a little off, giving the opposite effect of a dopamine hit). But it’s more of a process to get there and the average user needs a faster feedback loop from shot to hit.
My typical test is to take a photo of the full moon. It works acceptably well on an iPhone (or Android). My recent Pixel phone even adjusts the brightness automatically. Sure, the lens is pretty wide-angle, so the pictures don't have many details.
I had to fiddle around for 20 minutes with settings on my Sony Alpha camera, eventually using manual focus and manual exposure. The pictures are, of course, better because of the lens and the full-frame sensor.
But the user experience is just sad. So I often just don't bother to take my camera with me on my trips anymore.
Also, a note to camera makers: USE ANDROID INSTEAD OF YOUR CRAPPY HOME-GROWN SHITWARE. Add 5G, normal WiFi, GPS, Play Store, a good touchscreen. You'll have an instant hit.
I do not want android on a phone. I don't want to update or reboot it. I want to turn it on, use it and turn it off again. And I don't want someone substituting pictures of the moon for stuff online (hey Samsung!)
Wow, that Pixel 6 shot is awesome in all the wrong ways. I have no idea how it could have happened.
Of course, cameras with large sensors and lenses are going to be better than small phone sensors. Physics is physics. It's just that it doesn't matter that much for most people (me included).
> I do not want android on a phone. I don't want to update or reboot it.
I have used Galaxy Camera back in 2014. It was awesome. I could take pictures, and automatically upload them to Picassa (RIP) or share them with people. The UI was also pretty good, but it was clearly a V1 without too much polish.
> I want to turn it on, use it and turn it off again.
I have an Onyx book reader that runs Android. It works just like this. I pick it up, press a button, and it shows the book I've been reading within a second. So it's clearly possible.
Great example of the primary difference here. I've said that the photos out of my mirrorless (also Z50, great camera) are true photographs in the sense that they capture light and show it to me.
My smartphone however does not create photos, it creates digital art based on the scene. Your Pixel image is a perfect example of how algorithms (now called "AI") re-paint a scene in a way that resembles reality when zoomed out.
Comparing smartphone and camera is really apples to oranges at this point, as smartphones aren't even capturing photos, they're entirely repainting scenes.
> Comparing smartphone and camera is really apples to oranges at this point, as smartphones aren't even capturing photos, they're entirely repainting scenes.
Calm down, it's not that bad. Take for example night sight or astrophotography; it's using ML to intelligently stitch together light across time because available light in one moment is not enough to capture anything intelligible. Your end result is an accurate representation of what your eyes see (e.g. my own face in a nighttime selfie) and what is sitting there in the sky (the stars). You can call that repainting, but I disagree, it's more information aggregation over the temporal dimension.
Super resolution is similar, using shakes in your hand to gather higher resolution than you can accomplish with a single frame of data from your low res sensor grid. 2-3x digital zoom with super res technology is actually getting more information and more like optical zoom. It's not just cropping+interpolating.
Now...portrait mode. That's clearly just post-processing. But also...does blurring the background using lens focus have any additional merit vs doing it in post (besides your "purity"-driven feelings about it)?
At the end of the day, I want my mirrorless to do more than be a dumb light capture machine. I spent $X thousand+ for a great lens and sensor, so I want to maximize. It should do more to compensate automatically for bad lighting, motion blur, etc. It should try harder to understand what I want to focus on. As a photographer, I should get to think more about what photo I want taken and think less about what steps I need to take to accomplish that. My iPhone typically does a better job of this than my $X000 mirrorless. So I use my iPhone more.
> Take for example night sight or astrophotography
Oh speaking of astrophotography. It occured to me that all those pretty images of remote planets and nebulas have been doctored to hell and back.
What I don't know is where I can find space images that show the visible spectrum - i.e. what I'd see if i managed to travel there and look out the window.
Well, you're of course using the best example on the one side and the worst on the other side, so that's not really a fair comparison.
Apart from that:
The phones generally try to substitute the tiny sensors through highly complex software algorithms, creating something that sometimes only has a broad similarity with the original scene.
The cameras, on the opposite, usually have crappy software and rely on their great sensors (and other hardware).
So in an ideal world, you'd have a proper camera with good software.
That software then doesn't have to do all the (good or bad) stuff which is only there to try to make the best out of less than ideal image input, but instead it can provide more user friendly features which allow making quick and easy photos without having to study tutorials for a week (yes, now I am exaggerating a little on purpose :)).
This software doesn't have to do all the crap that in any way reduces the image quality in the end.
Please don't just think in the extremes, but look for the healthy middle way that would provide the best out of both worlds.
It is not Android that does the image processing itself btw., but special software that the phone manufacturers add on top of Android.
So this part would be the responsibility of the camera's manufacturer again, but this time they could focus more on their central use case (help making good pictures) instead of writing everything (like the user interface) themselves. And they could even provide their users with more options to extend their software for even better photos.
Of course. It does an equivalent of suspend-to-RAM after a few minutes of inactivity. It then can stay in this state for at least several weeks. I'm not sure for how long, I have never left my book reader for more than two weeks.
Cold reboot after updates takes about 20 seconds, like my phone.
So turn your camera on once when you pack your things for the flight. It can stay in sleep mode for at least a couple of weeks without draining the battery.
At this point I would've imagined Apple would have a moon detection feature and just replace it with a stock image cutout when detected in the field of view.
I love my d7100 and z5. There are some pictures only they can take over a phone, but it would take a user much longer than 5 minutes to beat their iPhone. I’ve been carrying the current gen iPhone and my larger camera for years and I use the iPhone more and more. The shots are good and easy to set up. I mostly keep a zoom on my larger camera now to give me reach and often use the iPhone otherwise.
Only applies to the small portion of the population that enjoys the process. I could never appreciate digital cameras. Take a bunch of shots , then go home and filter those shots for the good ones, then adjust the color of those shots. No thanks, not my cup of tea.
Funny enough I enjoy shooting film over digital. A lot less work and decision to be made.
For myself at least there is less mental load shooting film compared to digital. I am not taking multiple shots of the same thing generally and I don't develop the film myself. Historically the two things I did not like about digital was too many photos to review and having to work on each photo at home. There is something about not having the choice of which shot to pick and how to adjust the colors that is nice.
I have been interested in some of the micro 4/3 cameras that have prebuilt filters in them but I think film for me is king if I have a camera.
You can run a digital camera like that too. I am more interested in composition than camera set up and spend most of my time shooting in aperture priority. At best I'll tweak the white balance but the camera mostly just deals with that for me. I take few photos. I spent 16 days on a trek recently and took about 50 photos in total.
Ok let me clarify for you. In this context I am talking about point-and-shoot cameras, bridge cameras, DSLRs and mirrorless. Everything but a phone camera.
I’ve gotten far more amazing photographs (including exhibit quality large format ones) since smart phones became a thing than I ever had with an SLR. Because I always have the phone handy.
If you’re always walking around with a camera bag? Sure. If you’re regularly in beautiful situations without one? Eh…
Basically every news event in the last 15 years is caught on phone cameras. That's the magic. A device with which you can start streaming to the world in 30 seconds.
It's mainly zillions of photos of kids and pets and food, so it doesn't matter if other viewers aren't impressed, they're impressive to the person who took them.
Why not? Studying a culture from hundreds of years ago and measuring its advances in various ways, technological and societal.. seems fitting for the National Geographic's definition of anthropology as "study of the development of human societies and cultures".
You do know that people still print photos, right? Some of them will definitely survive. And unless the human civilization collapses I don't see why some digital media wouldn't survive either.
Speaking of photography and the progression of technology (and not spoiling the amazing final scene of the story) I highly recommend reading this poignant prescient classic:
"The Wedding Album" short story by David Marusek
>"Wait a minute!" shouted Benjamin, waving his arms above his head. "I get it now. we're the sims!" The guests laughed, and he laughed too. "I guess my sims always say that, don't they?" The other Benjamin nodded yes and sipped his champagne. "I just never expected to be a sim," Benjamin went on. This brought another round of laughter, and he said sheepishly, "I guess my sims all say that, too."
>"The Wedding Album" is a science fiction short story by David Marusek. It was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction in June 1999.
>Synopsis:
After their wedding, Anne and Ben realize that they are merely recordings of the real Anne and Ben, destined to relive the hours surrounding the wedding for all eternity.
>With wedding photos and videos and mementos of all kinds, newlyweds attempt to hold on to their special day and to cherish it forever. Someday technology may enable us to record not only our appearance and voices but everything we know, feel, fear, and love at the moment the shutter clicks. Then our wedding mementos, like Anne and Ben’s in this story, take on a life of their own in a world where love may be eternal, but the world is not. Till deletion do us part . . .
I don't understand why that's relevant. I never upload my photos anywhere. I'm pretty sure my photos that I have printed and/or stored locally don't go anywhere if Google shuts down tomorrow.
I think just the fact that people started practicing every day photography and seeing hundreds of shots done by peers everyday will be a huge factor in raising quality as well.
Yes, nothing really wrong with this. Just pointing out that what hits the sensor is far off from what's being saved.
However, some phones now even apply AI filters to fill in detail it didn't capture. Like adding craters to the moon.
And the thing about contrast, sharpness etc is that "more always looks better" at a quick glance. So when people are doing comparisons between phones etc, the one destroying the picture the most might be declared the winner.
Maybe similar to the (alleged) reason cakemixes require you to add an egg: it makes it feel more like you baked it yourself if you have to do more than just add water and put it in the oven.
Maybe users feel like they ‘touched up’ their photo if they tap the magic wand button.
I wonder if there is a big enough market for a middle ground device. A good SLR like camera which has a great sensor and a lens but a good control compromise on the software. Not fully managed PaaS but the VM equivalent, if you consider Nikon D7100 as the bare metal Linux box of the 90s.
Honestly the iPhone with an app like Halide is this. In some cases, iphone processed photos and videos get almost indistinguishable from thousands of dollars worth of camera, but sometimes they go overboard with processing. Halide lets you dial that back a bit.
It's not my primary job, but I do some pro and fine art captures as well as video compositing and photo editing– the pro phones definitely have their uses just as my little micro 4/3 and full frame DSLR do, both with still and video work.
With glass and a sensor that small they aren't for everything, but the days of mandatory compression, limited color depth, mandatory "enhancements" and all of that stuff are over. If I'm shooting a handheld gimbal video, of something like a person talking outdoors not in direct sunlight, I'm grabbing that iPhone Pro without thinking twice.
Well, except that log (as well as almost every other format : "gamma" refers to the exponent of a power function !) is the opposite of raw : raw is focused on fidelity to the number of photons, log and others on fidelity to how the (human) eye reacts to these photons :
This is almost entirely due to sensor size. The sensor on the iPhone is smaller than your pinky nail with pixels between 1µm and 2µm in size (depending on which camera is used), the Nikon on the other hand has pixels over twice the largest size on an iPhone.
This video is excellent. About halfway through I was thinking, "Oh so this is like RAW for video" and then seconds later he gets to explaining how it's not exactly RAW.
