that is absolutely incredible! Very happy they actually figured out its not a copy and different lightroom effects. It did seem slightly different positions in the original compressed images.
5d's image looks remarkably better in terms of colour depth and details.. wondering whether it's due to the sensor size (full frame vs aps-c) or some other factor?
That's true, but Risman is clearly very liberal with photoshopping ("moon-stitching" liberal), and it seems to me that that's the largest factor.
The turquoise tone in the waves has been overlayed (it's fake, in other words), and I bet other areas of the photo has been very heavily modified in an artificial way.
I would be curious though to read a professional analysis, since this is a very interesting (and I think rare) case of how a photo looks before and after fabric... I mean, after "art has been applied". /s
(Also, I wonder if Risman used a polarizing filter, while Gendron didn't, as it generally contributes to this type of difference (deeper blue tones, and increased resolution due to dehazing)).
Are you just looking at the low resolution images in the article? If so, I think most of it can be attributed to post-processing. At that resolution the sensor size isn't going to make a big difference.
The histogram could just be stretched differently for both photos. By changing the gain and offset of the picture, you could possibly get more closely matched photos.
A photographer makes a lot of decisions before collecting the data (ie. shooting) and a lot more in post-processing.
Framing and timing the shot are some of the most important ones, and here they were almost exactly the same. But even at the time of shooting, given the same equipment, you'd have the choice of aperture, shutter speed, sensitivity (ISO). Also things like whether your lens is in the sun or the shade may affect the result tremendously. If you made these choices well, you have unspoiled data with a good dynamic range, and that allows all kinds of post-processing. And of course post-processing is an art in itself.
What I'm trying to say is, photography is more about skill than equipment. In the given situation there was a lot of light so even a relatively bad camera equipment would have sufficed.
would be insane if it were a marketing stunt too! Taking the same picture of the same moment of a huge unplanned wave would be a feat worth of the marketing purpose.
the article says that at least ron was shooting for 45 minutes. Which is an average time, but if you consider how many photos a modern camera takes per second...
its technically possible to plan, but just as likely to happen on accident. And its definitely a wonderful example why the idea of intellectual property for photographs is a flawed concept.
But its not an easy topic and photographers still need to earn their living. That means some protection from publishers that just take their shots without paying.
Suggesting something on the internet is fake is a fool's errand. Anybody can do it about anything so it's worthless. What else might be fake? The story that it happened? Maybe he just took one photo and photoshopped it! Maybe it's not really a photographer at all. Maybe you live in the Matrix. This kind of reasoning goes down a black hole to nowhere.
You have to maintain a basic level of trust in the source of information if you're going to have any interesting thoughts about it. Finding actual evidence of fakery would be worthwhile, or checking some features and reporting how you found none would be too. But there's no value suggesting it just because you feel cynical.
Not only did I find that I was (barely) in the picture, but I had a picture of the photographer either before or after he took that picture (not at the same time, obviously, since I was turned the other way at the time of his picture):
I was working on a long-duration balloon payload (ANITA-IV), so I was in a hangar much of the time. Since it was summer, it wasn't that cold, but the constant daylight is disorienting. The isolation from the rest of the world is the hardest part, even though at McMurdo, unlike pole, there is (slow) internet all day long.
McMurdo is an interesting place with a lot of fascinating people and the scenery is very beautiful. As our balloon launched pretty quickly after we were ready to launch, I unfortunately didn't get much downtime to do all of the hiking trails and such (but on the plus side, I got to go home earlier).
If you ever get a chance to go (either as a scientist or, possibly more likely for many, as support staff), I highly recommend it.
> France operates two stations in Antarctica: Dumont d’Urville Station, in Adelie Land, and the French-Italian joint Concordia Station.
Dumont d’Urville was built in 1956 on Petrel Island where it houses a maximum of 30 people in winter (about 100 in summer).
Concordia was built in 1997 and is operated year round since 2005. It can house 15 people in winter and 60 people in summer. The inland Concordia Station is re-supplied annually by three ground traverses leaving Cap Prudhomme Station, a small annex station of Dumont d’Urville. In addition, France operates three stations in the Sub-antarctic islands: Crozet, Kerguelen and Amsterdam Islands.
I have a friend who sometimes works at Pole, and they apparently do need people to winter over and manage the IT infrastructure. I don't know whether they have citizenship requirements (it's a US-led station), but it's apparently a hard enough position to recruit for (six+ months in the dark) that they might be flexible.
Since the employment would not be in the US, I'm guessing that no work visa would be required. If you are really interested, I think it would be worth your while to contact them.
Depends on what age you are, if you are less than 30 it's not very difficult to get to Dumont d'Urville.
I went to Kerguelen island myself as a sysadmin (14 months, a winterover). I had the choice between Kerguelen, Crozet, New Amsterdam and Dumont d'Urville, I don't regret my choice at all even if Kerguelen lacks the special distinction of being on Antarctica.
The Polar Institute, IPEV, recruits about 10 or so IT-related personnel each year (though only two recruitments are for pure sysadmin types - Kerguelen and Dumont d'Urville) under a civilian service contract. It's worth trying it if you're less than 30.
Otherwise it's going to be difficult, and even more so for Concordia I'm afraid.
There's a cosmic rays detector that I was in charge of, even if I have little idea how it works. Apparently, it requires some very toxic gas (I have forgotten its name... something with -fluor- in it maybe?) that has since become forbidden from shipping.
So there are a few spares remaining on the island (forbidden from shipping away anyway) but no legal way to keep operating once they are used up.
Improbable or not, that's great! Two people taking the same photo with phones seems likely these days, but accidentally discovering a picture of yourself taking a picture of the photographer, published in the NYT, that's an awesome coincidence.
I love how completely and dramatically different those two photos of the same place and time are. The reporter was telling a story of somewhere remote and hard to get to and barely touched by humans. One single sturdy but old Siberian looking truck and a half dozen crazy scientists in front of vast stretches of nothing but snow. And yours is showing a bit more of the day in the life there for humans standing next to an airport. The real dot on the i, and extra minor coincidence is the jet taking off right next to the reporter's head. Both photos are true, and both photos, one could say, give misleading impressions taken only on their own.
Totally cool, but not unlikely. With the sheer volume of high-end cameras and photographers using burst mode, this will certainly happen time and time again. It’s likely that this happens several times most days.
Some simple math: one camera was taking a photo every 143 milliseconds (roughly) and the other every 196 milliseconds (roughly). If both sit in burst mode continuously, I would expect these cameras to share the same millisecond (meaning each photograph took place within 1 millisecond of the other) every 28,000 milliseconds (roughly) or every 28 seconds.
I’d also argue that the details of this ‘unplanned’ event increased the likelihood that two photographers would select the same photo out of a series of bursts - didn’t the author say only about 3 images came out nice? Well, I imagine the other photographer had the same experience.
Maybe somebody could use these photos to legally destroy concepts of creative input / originality in non staged photography and remove copyright protection from such works.
When I first joined my local photographer's club, one of the masters there told me that I need to accept that all the photos I will take will have been probably already shot by someone else.
Obviously not that realistic, but articles like this sure make it sound more plausible.
> all the photos I will take will have been probably already shot by someone else
> Obviously not that realistic
Depends on how literally you want to take it. Lighthouses have definitely been photographed before. Photos depicting the man vs wild nature archetype too.
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For the record : those two parts (their CA / own services, and their teams responsible for security) are really well separated and it is not the first time a Google thingy is deemed unsafe by Google security.
Whatever one thinks of Google, it's hard to not agree that they take security very seriously, both internal and external (and project zero is one of the best thing ever).
Personally, I prefer it that way. Better to see "ahah, Google tells me Google is insecure" than allowing something flagged as bad just because it come from the same mothership.
I think everyone who visualizes laser beams, light rays, etc. forgets to set the no_shadow property at first, and then chuckles upon seeing the result.
It's a matter of opinion but I strongly disagree, the brief existence of a lightning bolt is going to force the exact same moment out of two photographers, and they were shot from two wildly different locations. The analysis was fairly cool but I see cool things every day.
The sheer improbability of two photographers capturing the same wave in the exact same way from meters apart and publishing the same shot is captivating. There are thousands of waves daily, and thousands of interesting places to capture them.
not really. one you setup your tripod there, you are already focusing on the light house... and then when a wave is crashing in, you just hold down the shutter for a few burst shots... very easy to replicate the same shot...
say if it was a photo group... then the chance of same shot being outputted is even greater
Two professional photographers having independently selected the exact same frame from two different bursts they captured with their cameras is an interesting instance, illustrating the pro-AI argument in photography and possibly adjacent creative domains.
Grossly simplified, two humans went through dozens or hundreds of shots with identical internal “algorithm” and did the same work twice. This shows that the algorithm can be “abstracted away”, and the work can be done for them by the machine.
I can roughly see the counter-argument to be made, considering true creative self-expression and art losing value as its hardest aspect becomes optional (“natural selection” of produced work via artist’s taste)—but it’s hard to argue, in the light of this example, that professionals would find such a tool indispensable.
Sorry but I do not agree at all. First, the fact that they chose the same photo might not necessarily mean that photo is the "optimal choice" according to some algorithm: it can perfectly be a coincidence. I find it even more improbable that a tool that selects "the best photo of a bunch" is useful for a significant portion of the photographers (as in "it gives results according to their tastes") unless it takes into account only basic measures and they can use it in specific instances (e.g. find the photo with the best light exposure).
> First, the fact that they chose the same photo might not necessarily mean that photo is the "optimal choice" according to some algorithm: it can perfectly be a coincidence.
Well, obviously it does mean that; the photo was the optimal choice according to the two algorithms used by those photographers to choose their picture.
Does that mean it would also be selected by another equally good or superior algorithm? No. But it does necessarily mean that the photo is the optimal choice according to two algorithms.
True, but the image in question would trivially be optimal according to that algorithm, as it considers all images equal. If all images are equal, there is no image better than this image.
That there is one instance of two photographers choosing the same "best photo" does not show anything general. And even if there were some universal consensus for "best photos", whether machines can do it is an entirely different question.
A simple explanation for the image selection match might be that the wave is at its highest point in the chosen image.
At this lighthouse location, photographers are looking for that shot.. they wait for the wave, then shoot. There might only be a handful of images in the burst that qualify - perhaps less than 10, so the coincidence is not that amazing. It's cool, but not "scary freaky" coincidental.
Now if they were using a single shot camera, that would be more amazing.
These aren't the exact same frame at all. They are photoes of the same thing, that's certainly true, but the photoes are quite different. Risman's photo is way more dramatic and moving with all that contrast, bright, defined colours, and dark shadows. Gendron's instead looks quite composed, with pastel colours and less distinguishing details, and has more of a quiet grandeur to it. They'd hardly pick the same photo from their bursts if it was not for the big wave that struck the lighthouse. Artistic expression includes the selection of the scene, but also more. It's in the way the cameras were set up, the photoes were post-processed, the way accents were decided, and how the photoes are perceived now that we are seeing them.
Literally the same millisecond (according to timestamps), or ‘only’ the same tenth of a second or so (as demonstrated by the pictures being near identical)? Those would both be unlikely and remarkable events, but one is 100 times more unlikely than the other :)
Timestamps are not useful for this since the cameras clocks are likely off by more than a millisecond.
I think a millisecond is too strong of a claim, but it's almost certainly much less than 1/10th of a second. (a simple though experiment that you could turn into a real experiment if you have a camera: If you take a 1/10th second exposure of something like this the magnitude of the motion blur will be much greater than the differences between the wave shapes on the two cameras).
So if two people are shooting in burst mode, and both have an overlap in their shooting burst of say 2 seconds with 5 images per second. Then the chances is already (2 * 5)/1000 to land a picture in the same millisecond.
You'd expect in 100 burst of pictures taken like this for one to be taken at the same millisecond.
It's not that unlikely. What's more unlikely is that they selected the same shot and found out about it. This probably happens multiple times every day, just by virtue of the billions of people in the world taking a photo every day.
My guess is that the water doesn't move much faster than 10 m/s which translates to 1 cm/ms. You certainly can't make out 1 cm differences in the images, so the "same millisecond" claim is definitely exaggerated. From a quick look, the time difference could even be more than 10 ms, but not by much.
The time frame in question doesn't seem that big. There were probably not that much large breakers and the they both chose the peak of one with the best conditions. So maybe a 1:100 to 1:10.000 chance. I'm more amazed, that they went down the whole photoshop route before comparing angles. If someone had that kind of skill in retouching, he wouldn't need to copy photos to make a living.
The foreground wave is definitely from a noticably different angle, but still the same scene, even the white caps in the far background look very different. You don't need a high res image for that, only, when cropped to the lighthouse only.
Not really. The birthday paradox is a paradox because it describes a circumstance that seems unlikely but actually is not. In this case it both seems unlikely and IS unlikely. If it were not unlikely we would see it happen more often.
Like I posted somewhere else here, it likely happens hundreds of times a day (going by millisecond granularity and # of photos being taken per day in close vicinity in the world). That people afterwards see each others photos and find out about it is rather unlikely.
It probably happens most days in the Louvre at the Mona Lisa. Although she doesn't move very much.
It's unlikely that it would happen for any given shot, but it is very unlikely that it would never happen across all shots taken, which is the crux of the birthday paradox.
Cool idea for a service like Flickr (or at least Flickr in its prime, which is not now) to exploit -- given EXIF data and a database of photos, one could find all the photos taken in the same location at the exact time. While almost no cameras embed GPS information, I bet there are ways to infer the location in many cases.
This was in fact the business of the infamous Color startup[0]. For those not familiar, they raised a ridiculous amount of money, then shut down and returned most of it to the investors. My favorite memory of Color was when they became a landmark when they bought a massive office in downtown Palo Alto, got hit with zoning restrictions which forced them to use the ground floor for retail or leave it empty (they left it empty).
This is typical birthday paradox stuff right? The chance that these two photographers would ever snap the same thing at the same time is small, but the chance that any two photographers, anywhere, would do so is, I bet, pretty big (even if you factor in millisecond precision). With photographers being photographers and the internet being the internet, there's also a pretty decent change that they'd find out about it and write a blog post like this, no? :-)
Correct, but there are about eight orders of magnitude more milliseconds than days, and you need another two or so orders of magnitude because not everyone is a photographer who publishes their photos. Then again, the internet is a medium that reaches many more people, which is not true of the average birthday. So one would still expect this to happen only maybe every few years.
Well, but I am not sure that you would indeed require it to be the same millisecond. I mean I don't know how long the exposure was, but I guess its longer than a millisecond (just took a look at some of my own photos and they were at 4-5ms exposure in very bright sunlight, the blog image exposure is probably more like 10ms). The heading says that the pictures were taken in the same millisecond, but as far as I understand the post, they concluded it from the image, so I wonder what the precision is you can derive from a photo?
They said they compared EXIF metadata, so they should know when each of the shots were taken. I'm not a photographer and don't know what level of detail is recorded there, though.
The time in the EXIF metadata is just based on the time/date stamp that's been set in the camera. I don't know about the newer Canon but I'm pretty sure the older model would just be something someone manually set.
Re-reading the article, I think saying the pics were shot at the "same millisecond" was just a colloquial expression to mean the look of the waves makes it look as if they were shot at the exact same time. They shared metadata but that seems to have been to share the other shooting parameters. I believe (and this would seem to confirm [1]) that EXIF timestamp data is only precise down to 1 second. added: and only as accurate as the photographer who set the date and time.
Both cameras (5DM4 and 60D) can be set via GPS using a Canon accessory, but I highly doubt that is the case (very few own that from what I have seen). Even then, the camera doesn't preserve millisecond data in the EXIF data.
The time precision that you can derive from the spray of the waves is a lot more precise that anything you will get out of the exif data - the wave will only have that exact captured spray pattern for a small fraction of a second, but the time synchronization on the two photographers cameras is almost certainly out by a larger amount of time than the wave looked that way.
Working with images from multiple photographers cameras who haven't gone out of their way to sync the time beforehand, I've usually had to assume about a 10s time skew. They do not have precise clocks and are not sybchronized often.
It's made more remarkable IMO that they were two _professional_ photographers though, and that it's not just two snaps that happen to have the same timestamp, they both chose that moment to feature from the burst they probably took around that moment, the hundreds of other moments in proximity, and the thousands (I suppose? I'm no photographer) they each took throughout the day.
It's made more likely that they (when there's first an overlap in their shooting) would select the same picture by virtue of getting roughly the same shots and their shots being likely to have many of the same qualities. Chances are they'll value many of the same qualities and so would at least exclude shots of many of the same moments for the same reasons.
That they're professional photographers might reduce the odds by virtue of there being fewer of them, but might increase the odds by virtue of them being more likely to be the kind of people to know of specific spots to go out of their way to take pictures from during a storm, and more likely to value the same qualities i their shots, as well as more likely to publicize their photos enough for one of them to find the other persons photo.
That fact makes it possible, but as he pointed out, they were taking photos at different rates of burst mode, and even then they happened to snap at the same millisecond. Usually each picture in burst mode of moving water is completely different. I think in that gas it makes sense that they would choose the same subject and the same photo since it was probably the biggest splash from that wave. As if they were choosing from the same set of photos, even though all their other photos had different moments.
I question the exact same millisecond part. There’s zero proof of that (and actually counter proof examining the photos). Same second, sure. Same millisecond, I think someone is reaching a bit much to make a story.
As I said in another comment, I'm pretty sure "same millisecond" is being used by the photographer in the sense of "same instant" or "same moment in time" not literally same millisecond based on a super-accurate time source. That information does not exist in the photo's EXIF data which is one-second resolution and typically derives from a manual time/date setting in the camera's menu.
I am not taking issue with the author of the post as I agree, that is likely the intent. But folks here seem to be parroting it as fact rather than taking the liberty you and I seemed to do.
The birthday paradox arises because the probability that two candidates do not match is small compared to the number of candidates. In this case, the candidates are photos and a match in fact requires a match on multiple variables (e.g. angle, timing) that are effectively continuous. A match between 2 arbitrary photos must then have zero-ish probability and a non-match must have one-ish. So it still seems inestimably improbable that something like this would happen.
I'm not so sure. While there are multiple variables, chances are the number of landmarks in a given area that a professional photographer will consider likely to stand out as worthwhile in a storm is not all that great. While I'm not a professional photographer, I can think of maybe 3-4 places near me, for example.
And storms do not happen that often, even in places that have them "frequently", and they delimit the time, and even further by e.g. limitations such as whether the wind is too strong or the rain too heavy.
The number of locations they're likely to consider good spots to take the photo from for a given landmark may not be that great either. Both in terms of where you can actually see the landmark from, and in terms of other factors (e.g. in this case the article writer points out that both photographers had found places where they could protect themselves against some of the effects of the weather)
So that narrows locations and timeframe significantly.
Professional photographers are likely to take their time - the article writer mentions 40+ minutes of shots, and using bursts, further increasing the chance for an overlap within already relatively narrow time frames.
Additionally, external events that are the same for both (the waves) will give impulses to both with respect to when to shoot (though of course they might value different things, I'd argue people are more likely to shoot when something dramatic happens - e.g. if you have a dull day and suddenly something happens, you don't expect the pictures of that day to be evenly spaced afterwards).
I'm not saying we should expect it to happen all the time, but I also think it's easy to overestimate the number of possibilities because we've not tried to enumerate which ranges of values are actually likely.
There are probably well over 10 trillion photos taken. Less by professionals, but they are more likely to take the same photo.
Anyway, that low probability applies to every other photo. So, the first photo is compared to every other photo and by the end your talking ~50,000,000,000,000,000,000 comparisons. The odds would have to be mind boggling tiny for this not to happen all the time.
You're missing the other dimension to this: it's not that two photographers took pictures at the exact same time, I'm sure that happens frequently. It's that they took the exact same picture. There were definitely not 10 trillion photos take of this lighthouse in new england.
They don't have to be photos of this lighthouse. Two photos of Old faithful showing the same spray and cloud patterns could be mistaken for copy's of each other.
Another way of thinking about it, what are the odds that out of the ~1,000 photos taken of the same moment they are of the same subject? Now repeat that question 10 million times and the odds don't seem as low.
I don't think the birthday paradox applies here. The birthday paradox requires a discrete set of pigeon holes, days of year, etc. If that set is infinite, then the countability [1] problem collapses.
While technically the world is discrete in space and time (planck length), for all intents and purposes it is infinite in practice.
[1] yes, there is countably infinite, but that doesn't work with the pigeon hole problem.
Reality may or may not be discrete, but what is a discrete value is the output from a digital camera, so in case of photographs your argument does not hold.
In other words, two photographs off by a planck length will generate the same set of pixels.
> but the chance that any two photographers, anywhere, would do so is, I bet, pretty big
Not necessarily, but the the chance of any crazy coincidence happening and reaching HN homepage is quite big. Next time it might be two people with same name writing the exact same tweet independently. Or perhaps one guy winning the World Series of Poker two times in a row with the same winning hand.
When there's a million "kinds" of crazy coincidences, the chance of any one of them happening is much higher than chance of a specific one happening. This is kind of a selection bias, we only hear about the coincidences that happened.
I think that's an important insight because it also plays a large part in many conspiracy theories. Basically if you look hard enough for any kind of statistical oddity you'll always end up finding something somewhere. If you only cherry-pick these data points and ignore the billions of "true negative" correlations it's easy to reach the craziest of conclusions. It's the same idea behind "anecdotes vs. data".
But the coincidence that makes it to the top of HN is when the poker guy wins his third WS using the exact same hand. (At this point he played the hand entirely out of superstition at a negative EV but got insanely lucky. He will eventually lose all his winnings playing that hand again and again for the rest of his life. But they’ll name the hand after him, so maybe it will all have been worth it.)
I'm curious about your WSOP mention - did you single this one out because it (remarkably) did happen before? Or were you speculating it could happen again in the future?
Interesting! For reference, it did happen once before. In 1976 and 1977, Doyle Brunson won the WSOP with the same hand - 10-2 (a terrible hand), and it's now named after him.
The odds of the same person winning the WSOP now at all are significantly smaller as the fields have grown so much, never mind the compounding of winning it with the same hand twice :)
(To clarify, it was not the exact same hand - different suits in each case. But still pretty remarkable!)
Oh, I was only vaguely aware that he won twice in a row, so I included an additional condition cause I wanted something that didn't happen. But I guess that subconsciously I had the fact that it was the same hand in memory.
Sort of, but instead of 365 distinct birthdays you have many thousands of non-overlapping time buckets (the two different burst mode frame rate), and it also doesn't "wrap around" the way birthdays do.
It's possible to judgde the relative positions of the photographers by eye based on some of the waves directly under the lighthouse. In Eric's picture there are some distinct crests immediately below the lighthouse door. In Ron's picture the exact same crests are on a diagonal line from the door toward the lower left corner of the frame. Tracing this imaginary line "out of the picture" would lead us to Eric's position, which means that Eric is to the left of Ron.
Wasn't he shooting continuously for 45 minutes? That's 3% of a day. Wouldn't he have a shot of the same millisecond of any photos taken during that time?
As usual I cut it in half straight down the middle. As usual I paid no attention to cutting it. I was just about to hand it to him when I noticed something strange, so I quickly took a photo...
The chances of the cut aligning the way it did, the blueberries lining up the way they did, the cut cutting the blueberries exactly in half, the blueberries ending up in this exact formation, me buying this specific muffin, the rotation of the muffin when I cut it....
Well, it just seems impossibly unlikely for something like this to have happened, yet it did!
I find it fascinating that the waves look so different when photographed from a slightly different position. Maybe the waves also change faster than the spray around the lighthouse?
The closer you are to something, the more quickly it appears to "move" when you shift your viewing position. The waves are much closer than the lighthouse so as you move left or right, their perceived position moves more quickly than the lighthouse. I guess the technical term is parallax?
I would love to see these in a stereoscopic viewer. If they really were taken that close together in time, and given the huge binocular separation, there should be a hell of a 3-D effect.
If you squint your eyes enough you can make them overlap and sure enough you get a perfect piece of 3D. The water at the front is a mess but the lighthouse and the spray have real depth.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadhttps://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/03/Compare_with_ci...
This is not surprising considering we're comparing a 60D that was released in Aug 2010 and a 5D4 released 6 years later.
The turquoise tone in the waves has been overlayed (it's fake, in other words), and I bet other areas of the photo has been very heavily modified in an artificial way.
I would be curious though to read a professional analysis, since this is a very interesting (and I think rare) case of how a photo looks before and after fabric... I mean, after "art has been applied". /s
(Also, I wonder if Risman used a polarizing filter, while Gendron didn't, as it generally contributes to this type of difference (deeper blue tones, and increased resolution due to dehazing)).
Framing and timing the shot are some of the most important ones, and here they were almost exactly the same. But even at the time of shooting, given the same equipment, you'd have the choice of aperture, shutter speed, sensitivity (ISO). Also things like whether your lens is in the sun or the shade may affect the result tremendously. If you made these choices well, you have unspoiled data with a good dynamic range, and that allows all kinds of post-processing. And of course post-processing is an art in itself.
What I'm trying to say is, photography is more about skill than equipment. In the given situation there was a lot of light so even a relatively bad camera equipment would have sufficed.
its technically possible to plan, but just as likely to happen on accident. And its definitely a wonderful example why the idea of intellectual property for photographs is a flawed concept.
But its not an easy topic and photographers still need to earn their living. That means some protection from publishers that just take their shots without paying.
You have to maintain a basic level of trust in the source of information if you're going to have any interesting thoughts about it. Finding actual evidence of fakery would be worthwhile, or checking some features and reporting how you found none would be too. But there's no value suggesting it just because you feel cynical.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/insider/freezing-temperat...
Not only did I find that I was (barely) in the picture, but I had a picture of the photographer either before or after he took that picture (not at the same time, obviously, since I was turned the other way at the time of his picture):
http://kicp.uchicago.edu/~cozzyd/coincidence.jpg
McMurdo is an interesting place with a lot of fascinating people and the scenery is very beautiful. As our balloon launched pretty quickly after we were ready to launch, I unfortunately didn't get much downtime to do all of the hiking trails and such (but on the plus side, I got to go home earlier).
If you ever get a chance to go (either as a scientist or, possibly more likely for many, as support staff), I highly recommend it.
http://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm
Thanks for sharing
> France operates two stations in Antarctica: Dumont d’Urville Station, in Adelie Land, and the French-Italian joint Concordia Station.
Dumont d’Urville was built in 1956 on Petrel Island where it houses a maximum of 30 people in winter (about 100 in summer).
Concordia was built in 1997 and is operated year round since 2005. It can house 15 people in winter and 60 people in summer. The inland Concordia Station is re-supplied annually by three ground traverses leaving Cap Prudhomme Station, a small annex station of Dumont d’Urville. In addition, France operates three stations in the Sub-antarctic islands: Crozet, Kerguelen and Amsterdam Islands.
https://www.comnap.aq/Members/IPEV/SitePages/Home.aspx
Qualified IT personnel are in demand. If this is something you want to do and you apply yourself towards this goal, I'm sure it's quite achievable.
It looks like they only hire Americans though (probably some requirement imposed on the contractor).
There are of course lots of other contractors for other sorts of jobs.
http://icecube.wisc.edu/jobs
Since the employment would not be in the US, I'm guessing that no work visa would be required. If you are really interested, I think it would be worth your while to contact them.
I went to Kerguelen island myself as a sysadmin (14 months, a winterover). I had the choice between Kerguelen, Crozet, New Amsterdam and Dumont d'Urville, I don't regret my choice at all even if Kerguelen lacks the special distinction of being on Antarctica.
The Polar Institute, IPEV, recruits about 10 or so IT-related personnel each year (though only two recruitments are for pure sysadmin types - Kerguelen and Dumont d'Urville) under a civilian service contract. It's worth trying it if you're less than 30.
Otherwise it's going to be difficult, and even more so for Concordia I'm afraid.
So there are a few spares remaining on the island (forbidden from shipping away anyway) but no legal way to keep operating once they are used up.
I love how completely and dramatically different those two photos of the same place and time are. The reporter was telling a story of somewhere remote and hard to get to and barely touched by humans. One single sturdy but old Siberian looking truck and a half dozen crazy scientists in front of vast stretches of nothing but snow. And yours is showing a bit more of the day in the life there for humans standing next to an airport. The real dot on the i, and extra minor coincidence is the jet taking off right next to the reporter's head. Both photos are true, and both photos, one could say, give misleading impressions taken only on their own.
Some simple math: one camera was taking a photo every 143 milliseconds (roughly) and the other every 196 milliseconds (roughly). If both sit in burst mode continuously, I would expect these cameras to share the same millisecond (meaning each photograph took place within 1 millisecond of the other) every 28,000 milliseconds (roughly) or every 28 seconds.
I’d also argue that the details of this ‘unplanned’ event increased the likelihood that two photographers would select the same photo out of a series of bursts - didn’t the author say only about 3 images came out nice? Well, I imagine the other photographer had the same experience.
It's why we exist at all.
> Obviously not that realistic
Depends on how literally you want to take it. Lighthouses have definitely been photographed before. Photos depicting the man vs wild nature archetype too.
> You cannot visit calculatedimages.blogspot.com right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later.
Maybe some MITM on your network? Dodgy SSL certs in your OS?
Blogspot is a google operated domain after all.
I don't use Chrome but I find it hard to believe that Chrome now distrusts Google's own CAs. A user errors seems more likely :)
Whatever one thinks of Google, it's hard to not agree that they take security very seriously, both internal and external (and project zero is one of the best thing ever).
Personally, I prefer it that way. Better to see "ahah, Google tells me Google is insecure" than allowing something flagged as bad just because it come from the same mothership.
I completely agree. Don’t think I stated otherwise?
Anyway, I find it hard to believe for any browser to untrust Google’s intermediate CA. And more so for Global Sign.
That said I recon that especially if Chrome started distruating Google CA that we all heard about it ;)
I'm getting a different cert at least. No cert errors.
Both certs have same common name, etc. But that's where the similarities end.
This is the cert I'm getting:
Serial number: 4254239493315191306
Validity: Tuesday, 20 February 2018 - Tuesday, 15 May 2018
Public key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
Signature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
Perhaps Google uses multiple certs with same Common Name on different servers. If so, I wonder if there's some security benefit.
Or what could the reason for that be?
The sheer improbability of two photographers capturing the same wave in the exact same way from meters apart and publishing the same shot is captivating. There are thousands of waves daily, and thousands of interesting places to capture them.
say if it was a photo group... then the chance of same shot being outputted is even greater
Grossly simplified, two humans went through dozens or hundreds of shots with identical internal “algorithm” and did the same work twice. This shows that the algorithm can be “abstracted away”, and the work can be done for them by the machine.
I can roughly see the counter-argument to be made, considering true creative self-expression and art losing value as its hardest aspect becomes optional (“natural selection” of produced work via artist’s taste)—but it’s hard to argue, in the light of this example, that professionals would find such a tool indispensable.
Well, obviously it does mean that; the photo was the optimal choice according to the two algorithms used by those photographers to choose their picture.
Does that mean it would also be selected by another equally good or superior algorithm? No. But it does necessarily mean that the photo is the optimal choice according to two algorithms.
At this lighthouse location, photographers are looking for that shot.. they wait for the wave, then shoot. There might only be a handful of images in the burst that qualify - perhaps less than 10, so the coincidence is not that amazing. It's cool, but not "scary freaky" coincidental.
Now if they were using a single shot camera, that would be more amazing.
I think a millisecond is too strong of a claim, but it's almost certainly much less than 1/10th of a second. (a simple though experiment that you could turn into a real experiment if you have a camera: If you take a 1/10th second exposure of something like this the magnitude of the motion blur will be much greater than the differences between the wave shapes on the two cameras).
You'd expect in 100 burst of pictures taken like this for one to be taken at the same millisecond.
It's not that unlikely. What's more unlikely is that they selected the same shot and found out about it. This probably happens multiple times every day, just by virtue of the billions of people in the world taking a photo every day.
The foreground wave is definitely from a noticably different angle, but still the same scene, even the white caps in the far background look very different. You don't need a high res image for that, only, when cropped to the lighthouse only.
It probably happens most days in the Louvre at the Mona Lisa. Although she doesn't move very much.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs
Re-reading the article, I think saying the pics were shot at the "same millisecond" was just a colloquial expression to mean the look of the waves makes it look as if they were shot at the exact same time. They shared metadata but that seems to have been to share the other shooting parameters. I believe (and this would seem to confirm [1]) that EXIF timestamp data is only precise down to 1 second. added: and only as accurate as the photographer who set the date and time.
[1] https://www.media.mit.edu/pia/Research/deepview/exif.html
Working with images from multiple photographers cameras who haven't gone out of their way to sync the time beforehand, I've usually had to assume about a 10s time skew. They do not have precise clocks and are not sybchronized often.
That they're professional photographers might reduce the odds by virtue of there being fewer of them, but might increase the odds by virtue of them being more likely to be the kind of people to know of specific spots to go out of their way to take pictures from during a storm, and more likely to value the same qualities i their shots, as well as more likely to publicize their photos enough for one of them to find the other persons photo.
And storms do not happen that often, even in places that have them "frequently", and they delimit the time, and even further by e.g. limitations such as whether the wind is too strong or the rain too heavy.
The number of locations they're likely to consider good spots to take the photo from for a given landmark may not be that great either. Both in terms of where you can actually see the landmark from, and in terms of other factors (e.g. in this case the article writer points out that both photographers had found places where they could protect themselves against some of the effects of the weather)
So that narrows locations and timeframe significantly.
Professional photographers are likely to take their time - the article writer mentions 40+ minutes of shots, and using bursts, further increasing the chance for an overlap within already relatively narrow time frames.
Additionally, external events that are the same for both (the waves) will give impulses to both with respect to when to shoot (though of course they might value different things, I'd argue people are more likely to shoot when something dramatic happens - e.g. if you have a dull day and suddenly something happens, you don't expect the pictures of that day to be evenly spaced afterwards).
I'm not saying we should expect it to happen all the time, but I also think it's easy to overestimate the number of possibilities because we've not tried to enumerate which ranges of values are actually likely.
Anyway, that low probability applies to every other photo. So, the first photo is compared to every other photo and by the end your talking ~50,000,000,000,000,000,000 comparisons. The odds would have to be mind boggling tiny for this not to happen all the time.
Another way of thinking about it, what are the odds that out of the ~1,000 photos taken of the same moment they are of the same subject? Now repeat that question 10 million times and the odds don't seem as low.
While technically the world is discrete in space and time (planck length), for all intents and purposes it is infinite in practice.
[1] yes, there is countably infinite, but that doesn't work with the pigeon hole problem.
In other words, two photographs off by a planck length will generate the same set of pixels.
How does that not apply to this situation? The number of comparisons between photos is much much larger than the number of photos.
It might not apply in a way that is interesting mathematically, but I don't think that is what the other poster was getting at.
Not necessarily, but the the chance of any crazy coincidence happening and reaching HN homepage is quite big. Next time it might be two people with same name writing the exact same tweet independently. Or perhaps one guy winning the World Series of Poker two times in a row with the same winning hand.
When there's a million "kinds" of crazy coincidences, the chance of any one of them happening is much higher than chance of a specific one happening. This is kind of a selection bias, we only hear about the coincidences that happened.
The odds of the same person winning the WSOP now at all are significantly smaller as the fields have grown so much, never mind the compounding of winning it with the same hand twice :)
(To clarify, it was not the exact same hand - different suits in each case. But still pretty remarkable!)
https://www.fooducate.com/app#!page=product&id=B7329F0C-B3E6...
As usual I cut it in half straight down the middle. As usual I paid no attention to cutting it. I was just about to hand it to him when I noticed something strange, so I quickly took a photo...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8tjrwql37i7ujjn/muffin.jpg?dl=0
The chances of the cut aligning the way it did, the blueberries lining up the way they did, the cut cutting the blueberries exactly in half, the blueberries ending up in this exact formation, me buying this specific muffin, the rotation of the muffin when I cut it....
Well, it just seems impossibly unlikely for something like this to have happened, yet it did!