Thread

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

204 points · 156 comments · robin_reala

dzink · 1789752442 · focus · HN ↗
You are a photographer from the olden age. Taking a photo back then took forever. You are standing on a hill trying to get the perfect picture of a sunset. You measure and sort and calculate angles and light. A tourist stands next to you with an high-speed iphone auto-settings camera. They spin around and get thousands of photos from different angles while you are thinking and measuring your one shot. That’s what AI does. It gives you many shots at the same problem. The thinking guy with the one approach will likely lose a photo competition to one of the accidentally better shots of the person who tried a lot more. Make and filter now may be a better approach than overthink and try only once.
1. bluGill · 1789753015 · focus · HN ↗
  The tourist has another advantage over your photographer: experience. They have thousands of photographs to look at and thus get a better scene of what makes things good. That is if you took both to the same spot and gave them one photograph (the phone's memory is almost full) the tourist is likely to get the better shot because they have a better idea of when to pull the trigger having seen all the possibilities.
  1. ninjascribble · 1789753767 · focus · HN ↗
    Really? The one who canonically doesn't consider lighting, depth of field, composition, etc... I can only speak from my own experience, but on average a typical person who doesn't consider themselves a photographer isn't going through the old photos on their phone and analyzing the quality and technique for future endeavors. They just want to send a fun picture to their friends and family. Nothing wrong with that, but it won't cultivate skill or lead to award-winning photography.
    bluGill · 1789754432 · focus · HN ↗
    They don't think of those terms. However they generally are looking at their photos and so get a sense of what "looks nice" - which is what those terms are all getting at.
    Now if you know and analyze your photos in those terms you can get good faster. There is no shortcut to the value of quantity.
    What we have never done here is define how much effort the "professional" has put into getting better. I've known a lot over the years that know the terms and have the "best" equipment, but they just take a measurement and put it into the tools without understanding the whole and so take really bad pictures. They consider composition as a checklist - which works okay (only okay) in a studio when it means put the chair here - but they can't handle a sunset where they can't control the scene.
    Award winning photography means get those details perfect. If you have the details right a phone is often more than good enough to take the right shot - and if it can take more photos faster than is worth a lot more than the best equipment limited to one shot (or a few) and hope that you get hit the shutter at the right moment. If you can get the right moment the better equipment is better, but that is one of the least important parts of the shot.
  2. Arodex · 1789754300 · focus · HN ↗
    I am sure the tourist can take hundreds or thousands of photos, and have every single one of them turn out wrong.
    It's not as if he was covering every combination possible of exposition, composition, depth of field, shutter speed etc. The tourist doesn't even know the existence of those settings.
    pixl97 · 1789755704 · focus · HN ↗
    >them turn out wrong.
    Define wrong in this case.
    I mean there are some obvious examples of a photo just being all black or all white. There are things so blurry that you can't identify the subject matter. But in between these extremes exist matters of preference and taste and everything goes subjective as hell. There are very few rights and wrongs here.
    Arodex · 1789756309 · focus · HN ↗
    Look at the iPhone photography awards:
    <a href="https://ippawards.com/winners/showcase" rel="nofollow">https://ippawards.com/winners/showcase
    How many of these pictures do you think were just a lucky shot by someone clueless about photography just shooting hundreds of photos?
    How many of these pictures could even be the result of just shooting at random thousands of photos?
    pixl97 · 1789757188 · focus · HN ↗
    "look at this list of subjective things"
    What is more interesting to me, the most beautiful photo of a sunset taken by an iPhone ever, or a mundane quality photo of my daughter taking her first steps?
    queenkjuul · 1789762134 · focus · HN ↗
    This conversation is about who would take an award winning photo. It's not about how much you personally like photography.
    pixl97 · 1789765854 · focus · HN ↗
    Looking in the conversation chain I'm not seeing that point...
    bluGill · 1789758600 · focus · HN ↗
    > someone clueless about photography just shooting hundreds of photos?
    That doesn't exist. The very act of taking hundreds of photos will give anybody a clue. They won't be able to pass a written test - they will have no clue what terms like "depth of field" mean - but they will start to apply the concepts in their photos without knowing the terms.
    I suppose there is someone who takes hundreds of photos without ever looking at them and thus never starts to develop any sense of what is good. Likewise some people just have more taste than others and so will get better. However in the real world people are taking lots of photos and they are on the way becoming reasonably good.
    Training alone will not make you a good photographer. Someone already skilled at this can help you look at your photos and understand why it "looks bad". However it takes hundreds - perhaps thousands of photos before you become an award winning photographer in the best case. While someone without training will need thousands of even tens of thousands - but these days a photo on an iphone is cheap enough that getting a thousand photos is not hard.
    Arodex · 1789804127 · focus · HN ↗
    >That doesn't exist. The very act of taking hundreds of photos will give anybody a clue.
    You have a very limited experience of life. Not only does it exist, it is even the majority.
  3. queenkjuul · 1789761973 · focus · HN ↗
    I really don't think so. A pro that knows all the ins and outs of working their camera for the perfect shot in the given conditions will do better than a one-off hope that the camera auto settings nail it. A professional literally spends their life framing shots, a tourist spams the shutter hoping one turns out and crops/filters/AI enhances their way from the best of the bunch to whatever will get likes from their family. No contest for a single exposure: the pro knows what they're doing, the tourist doesn't.

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