So does the author also hate people who rather buy records on vinyl instead of mp3?
Some people like old technologies, or simulated old technologies. It makes them feel nostalgic, escaping to allegedly simpler times for a quick moment. It's about emotions, not technology. I get it, the author doesn't like doing that, but why judge people who do?
Odd that you mention MP3 as the high-end because that is famous as a lossy encoding. He makes it clear that his beef is with wiping out detail that is already in hand.
So my dubious music analogy is scratching up your new CD so that it skips a bit.
He makes it clear that his beef is with wiping out detail that is already in hand.
...like ripping a CD to a lossy encoding, or taking a digital photo in JPEG. There really is no way make the complaint about data-degradation without counting these things. The author's real beef is with the aesthetics.
Perhaps all artists of any sort should abandon all forms of media except the most recent technologies. Who needs oil paints, or working with woods, metals, etc. Let's go purely digital so everything can be absolutely perfect.
The reality is everyone thinks they are a photographer these days because everyone has a camera in their pocket. Most people take awful, horrid photos, and tools such as hipstamatic and instagram can make even bad photos visually pleasing. If it makes the user happy, it's fine by me. It's their phone/camera and their life.
I spent a minute trying to figure out what you meant by saying "because it's funny few I thought..." when I realized you actually meant "because it's funny phew".
I'd also mention something about the punctuation, but frank, it was the few/phew slip that really confused me. =)
You can still be a geek and destroy the data in your photos. These funky photo apps give people who might ordinarily terrible at taking photos and gives them an edge. It's like a golf handicap. It adds a bit of flair and artisticness to what would otherwise potentially be some nasty looking photos of your friend's friends.
Technology isn't static, there will be a time when the quality from a phone camera is "good enough" that the whole first part of the diatribe becomes moot, arguably for most people it's already at that stage.
My Olympus digital camera from 2001 was a 4 megapixel item, flawed though megapixels are as a measure of quality, at those levels it did still matter, now my phone camera one-ups it in that department.
The problem is more, how and where do you store your photos so that you still have them, 40 years from now, which he does touch on to some extent. Somehow, I doubt Instagram will be the "system of record" for this, and for now, it's providing a service that some people find useful.
I think phone cameras have been at that point for a while.
I took my iPhone 4 and digital SRL on holiday this year, and my best shots where taken with the iPhone 4 simply due to serendipity.
At first I was actually annoyed when my friends and family preferred most of the iPhone shots on Flickr, but then maybe my SRL skills aren't as good as I thought they were!
At on-screen viewing sizes of web-shared photos (currently <1MP) you are going to struggle to see the better image quality that an SLR can provide. With prints of 10x8" or larger you will start to notice lack of sharpness and chroma noise.
This is not the default behaviour, and the setting is not available from within the app -- you have to exit, go to general settings, find the app in the list, and change the setting there. I would love to know how many instagram users do this, but I bet it's a tiny fraction.
What about all the people who shoot in jpeg instead of RAW? Also the camera manufacturers who don't enable RAW on their cameras, they are stealing our data! Revolt!</sarcasm>
I was a professional photographer before becoming a programmer. I think apps like instagram and hipstamatic are fantastic. Not everyone can to take the time to learn photo editing software, and filters add a new perspective on ordinary subjects.
This is akin to complaining that Impressionist paintings don't look "real" and therefore are not as good. I suppose we should be deploring the fact that we'll never, ever know what that starry sky in Arles really looked like because Van Gogh mucked it all up with his swirling colors.
What the author fails to understand is that most people, like artists, use photography (and many other recording media for that matter) to create or communicate a certain mood or feeling, not to document reality with the highest fidelity possible.
This is pretty different. Impressionism is creating art from scratch; this is taking art that has already been created and stamping it with a cookie-cutter filter effect. It adds no creative input at all, and in fact takes away from what is already there.
> It's funny how people use a lot of modern, often expensive, technology just to imitate effect of a 20yr old camera you can buy for like $50.
I think it's funny how you've already forgotten just how expensive it was to have film developed and printed.
The camera may cost you $50. The three good photos you get out of your roll of film will cost you $5-$10, and the photo CD with digital versions will cost you an extra couple bucks.
Go back in your hard drive and look at photos you took with your cellphone 5 years ago.
Ha ha, oh wow. No single sentence underscores the author's misapprehension of why people take most photos better than this. What's astonishing is that this is after he correctly grasps the concept of Instagram:
...it connects you to your friends, and it provides a way of sharing content with your friends that keeps you coming back to the app.
The astute reader will note that this doesn't sound like a solid data preservation strategy. But neither does connecting with friends sound like something particularly deleterious to the formation of memories. Quite the opposite: sharing signals memorability. If that comes at the expense of "destroying" the photo's accurate representation of the color of your couch cushions or the oiliness of your skin, so be it; those things are not memorable. The photo is not the memory.
This reminds me of the rants akin to Twitter's 140 character limitations back in the day. Instagram is useful and fun. I suspect Instagram is going to be just fine!
Images need to be uploaded. My iPhone uses T-Mobile with Edge. I do not want to wait for a 12MP photo to be transferred, ever. That is a prohibitive user barrier. Besides that, in the future they will be able to just say "ENHANCE" like in Blade Runner and this won't even be an issue.
Based on his other articles, this guy is either being intentionally inflammatory or should probably be medicated.
This commentary assumes, as its driving premise, that most users of apps like Instagram really care about data fidelity or picture quality as measured on a scale not immediately perceptible to them. I would wager that they don't. Furthermore, I take issue with the assertion that putting a cute filter on a photo is "destroying" its quality. To the users of Instagram, they're finishing the photo by doing that. It's part and parcel of the final product. The photo is not destroyed or degraded with the filter; it's made by the filter.
Not everyone (and, in fact, and perhaps a bit unfortunately, most people) cares about quality. They'll take fun and convenience every time. This is why you see people still using MP3s or lossy AACs on iTunes, for instance, and not filling up drive after drive with lossless rips directly from CDs. A lot of folks just want ease and fun and sharing, and there's nothing wrong with that in principle.
You know, this totally reminds me of my view on games like Guitar Hero [1]. "Why spend all that time learning how to press buttons when you could learn the real thing!" I would complain. I finally came to my senses one day and realized that the game was fun [2] and that I had rather been missing the point.
[1] I know there's a version out that teaches you the real thing. Hope it does well.
[2] It's still not my thing--too much time required--but I'm not going to spoil someone else's fun.
Wanna know what kind of photo data loss really makes me angry? Timestamps.
Big, yellow, irremovable timestamps covering a chunk of the photo.
All the time data you could possibly want is already embedded in the file. Want to print it? Ok then, go ahead and put a timestamp on the corner if you really want to. But please don't destroy the original.
The best camera is on you have in your hand at the time. I don't see a problem with letting people use whatever they have -- the technology will presumably get better if it is what is demanded by the market.
There are a couple of reasons the Instagram affects appeal to me, and I'm sure this applies to more people.
Nostalgia is fun. Memories have a way of distilling events down to their better parts. It's a natural adaptation. No one wants to remember the fight they had with their family on vacation. They want to remember the time that mom was startled by the bear that walked in to camp and went screaming in to the camper flailing the grilling instruments over her head. Mom, not the bear :)
Not everyone looks good in photographs. Maybe I don't want my likeness archived in high fidelity. When I recall fond memories, I don't remember my pale complexion and baggy eyes. I remember where I was, who I was with, and the good time we were having. This much is apparent by everyone's expression. And here's the cool thing, humans don't require a high-fidelity photograph to guess the disposition of the person in a photograph. We require very little detail. That's the great thing about our brains. It fills in the blanks very well. Personally, I prefer to fill in the blanks a little bit.
Cameras -- even film ones, and even big view cameras -- can't reproduce the full spectrum of color and dynamic range that the human eye can see. The result is that photographs often look "flat" in contrast to our memory of an event. When you look at photos taken by these old, vintage cameras, they have a certain warmth and color palette that doesn't match reality, but feels more interesting than a flat photo in some cases.
The whole point of my article is that real nostalgia is fun. However, faked-up 1970s polaroid nostalgia is just fake. These are real photos and over time they will accumulate real nostalgia; you can't shoe-horn it in right from the beginning by using a digital filter.
37 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 82.7 ms ] thread(I am not entirely convinced that faux-polaroid effects are a tragic loss of data as he suggests.)
Instagram have made a great app, and can give anyone the chance to do something neat with their phone...
and become a hipster :)
Some people like old technologies, or simulated old technologies. It makes them feel nostalgic, escaping to allegedly simpler times for a quick moment. It's about emotions, not technology. I get it, the author doesn't like doing that, but why judge people who do?
So my dubious music analogy is scratching up your new CD so that it skips a bit.
...like ripping a CD to a lossy encoding, or taking a digital photo in JPEG. There really is no way make the complaint about data-degradation without counting these things. The author's real beef is with the aesthetics.
Though I don't think the author's tone is justified. Some people are just having fun and rightly don't care about archival.
The reality is everyone thinks they are a photographer these days because everyone has a camera in their pocket. Most people take awful, horrid photos, and tools such as hipstamatic and instagram can make even bad photos visually pleasing. If it makes the user happy, it's fine by me. It's their phone/camera and their life.
I'd also mention something about the punctuation, but frank, it was the few/phew slip that really confused me. =)
My Olympus digital camera from 2001 was a 4 megapixel item, flawed though megapixels are as a measure of quality, at those levels it did still matter, now my phone camera one-ups it in that department.
The problem is more, how and where do you store your photos so that you still have them, 40 years from now, which he does touch on to some extent. Somehow, I doubt Instagram will be the "system of record" for this, and for now, it's providing a service that some people find useful.
I took my iPhone 4 and digital SRL on holiday this year, and my best shots where taken with the iPhone 4 simply due to serendipity.
At first I was actually annoyed when my friends and family preferred most of the iPhone shots on Flickr, but then maybe my SRL skills aren't as good as I thought they were!
I was a professional photographer before becoming a programmer. I think apps like instagram and hipstamatic are fantastic. Not everyone can to take the time to learn photo editing software, and filters add a new perspective on ordinary subjects.
500,000 users disagree
What the author fails to understand is that most people, like artists, use photography (and many other recording media for that matter) to create or communicate a certain mood or feeling, not to document reality with the highest fidelity possible.
Archeologists one day will wonder 'why did they do that?'
I think it's funny how you've already forgotten just how expensive it was to have film developed and printed.
The camera may cost you $50. The three good photos you get out of your roll of film will cost you $5-$10, and the photo CD with digital versions will cost you an extra couple bucks.
Ha ha, oh wow. No single sentence underscores the author's misapprehension of why people take most photos better than this. What's astonishing is that this is after he correctly grasps the concept of Instagram:
...it connects you to your friends, and it provides a way of sharing content with your friends that keeps you coming back to the app.
The astute reader will note that this doesn't sound like a solid data preservation strategy. But neither does connecting with friends sound like something particularly deleterious to the formation of memories. Quite the opposite: sharing signals memorability. If that comes at the expense of "destroying" the photo's accurate representation of the color of your couch cushions or the oiliness of your skin, so be it; those things are not memorable. The photo is not the memory.
Images need to be uploaded. My iPhone uses T-Mobile with Edge. I do not want to wait for a 12MP photo to be transferred, ever. That is a prohibitive user barrier. Besides that, in the future they will be able to just say "ENHANCE" like in Blade Runner and this won't even be an issue.
Based on his other articles, this guy is either being intentionally inflammatory or should probably be medicated.
Not everyone (and, in fact, and perhaps a bit unfortunately, most people) cares about quality. They'll take fun and convenience every time. This is why you see people still using MP3s or lossy AACs on iTunes, for instance, and not filling up drive after drive with lossless rips directly from CDs. A lot of folks just want ease and fun and sharing, and there's nothing wrong with that in principle.
[1] I know there's a version out that teaches you the real thing. Hope it does well. [2] It's still not my thing--too much time required--but I'm not going to spoil someone else's fun.
Big, yellow, irremovable timestamps covering a chunk of the photo.
All the time data you could possibly want is already embedded in the file. Want to print it? Ok then, go ahead and put a timestamp on the corner if you really want to. But please don't destroy the original.
That much is apparent.
There are a couple of reasons the Instagram affects appeal to me, and I'm sure this applies to more people.
Nostalgia is fun. Memories have a way of distilling events down to their better parts. It's a natural adaptation. No one wants to remember the fight they had with their family on vacation. They want to remember the time that mom was startled by the bear that walked in to camp and went screaming in to the camper flailing the grilling instruments over her head. Mom, not the bear :)
Not everyone looks good in photographs. Maybe I don't want my likeness archived in high fidelity. When I recall fond memories, I don't remember my pale complexion and baggy eyes. I remember where I was, who I was with, and the good time we were having. This much is apparent by everyone's expression. And here's the cool thing, humans don't require a high-fidelity photograph to guess the disposition of the person in a photograph. We require very little detail. That's the great thing about our brains. It fills in the blanks very well. Personally, I prefer to fill in the blanks a little bit.
Cameras -- even film ones, and even big view cameras -- can't reproduce the full spectrum of color and dynamic range that the human eye can see. The result is that photographs often look "flat" in contrast to our memory of an event. When you look at photos taken by these old, vintage cameras, they have a certain warmth and color palette that doesn't match reality, but feels more interesting than a flat photo in some cases.