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

204 points · 156 comments · robin_reala

  1. dzink · · 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 · · 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. queenkjuul · · 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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