Thread

1. 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.

         1. 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.

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