Photography is dead, long live photos

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/10/switched-on-photography-is-dead-long-live-photos/?

by nreece • 16 years ago

20 14 16 years ago

ugh• 16 years ago

It’s a boring concept. Get on with it, Canon, don’t waste our time with concepts. Don’t tell, just do. You are the biggest maker of cameras in the world. Leave publishing concepts to those who can’t actually make the future happen.

Aside: I don’t think photography will ever die. Video is not just improved photography, it’s something different. Stopping the action and making it possible to look at details are unique to photography. Photography is not just a wax cylinder [+] that will be cast aside as progress marches on. (Shooting halfway decent videos is also much harder than shooting halfway decent photos. But, arguably, people might not care about that and shoot their pathetic videos anyway.)

[+] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder

jberryman• 16 years ago

Exactly. And personally I think digital photography is a completely different animal from film and becoming more so everyday.

varjag• 16 years ago

Just like motion pictures killed photography, right? After all it was just the same as still photography, only 24 times per second?

yoshiks• 16 years ago

photography won't be dead. I heard same opinion when digital camera emerged. One day you see that beautiful liquid "photo"stream, but at same time you can still feel the beauty of gelatin silver print as great "photography".

migpwr• 16 years ago

I know this article's focus is more on the technology but this specific camera is going to look incredibly old in a year or two.

lukev• 16 years ago

When I've seen professional photographers at work, they seem to operate by taking a LOT of photos, often manipulating the shutter as fast as it can go, in the hopes that one of the pictures will be just right.

Isn't this the logical extension of that practice?

yardie• 16 years ago

That's the new way of doing it. The art of photography is about framing, subject, lighting, and a range of other factors. When film cost money it was about squeezing good shots out of a roll of 24 or 36. The cost of film, development, and blackrooms had a real $ value attached to it. You hired a photographer because he/she knew what they were doing and knew what you wanted.

Now, digital cameras are cheap and everyone has one. You can basically post a project online, and get 1000 photographers to respond. Instead of hiring 1 photographer to hopefully get "the" shoot. You can browse through flickr and other photo sites chances are they will have what you need.

Tamerlin2• 16 years ago

It is, but that approach is a way of avoiding developing skill in photography, and instead putting effort into being a better editor.

I don't shoot rapid-fire except when I'm shooting motion.

The most skilled photographers generally don't shoot that many frames. An example is when I'm using my 4x5; it takes 15 minutes to get the framing and focus exactly right, and it costs a couple of dollars to get each $2 sheet of film processed. You can bet that I'm very careful with my shots!

Corrado• 16 years ago

I think you guys are being a bit too short sighted. This shows some pretty neat "out-of-the-box" thinking about photography. In the past you were restricted to taking lots and lots of photos to possibly get one that worked. With video streams you can capture all you want and then go back and find the gems; probably stuff that you didn't even see the first time through.

Think about a play at your child's school; while your concentrating on your kid some other kid on the other end of the stage does something funny. Now you can go back "in time" and grab both shots and even a short section of video for context.

The whole thing makes me think of Blade Runner and the ability to shoot such high definition "streams" that you can "zoom - enhance" them all day long. Pretty cool if you ask me.

slantyyz• 16 years ago

  *Think about a play at your child's school; while your concentrating on your kid some other kid on the other end of the stage does something funny. Now you can go back "in time" and grab both shots and even a short section of video for context.*

I'm not sure that is the case. The weakest link in photography and videography is the human holding the camera. No amount of technology can fix that.

What does that mean? People with camcorders tend to zoom and pan like there's no tomorrow (classic case of "just because you can doesn't mean you should"). So assuming that a normal person is shooting their kid's play, they probably don't know to shoot it wide, meaning that the funny moment will be still offscreen, since the camera's zoomed in on their kid. And I haven't even mentioned any depth-of-field settings yet.

Some of the ideas in the concept are neat and make sense in theory, but in practice, you're just going to end up with way more video that none of your friends and family want to watch and are too polite to tell you so.

Tamerlin2• 16 years ago

"This shows some pretty neat "out-of-the-box" thinking about photography."

Not really, it's just an extension of burst mode, which a LOT of photographers used as a crutch -- and continue to use as a crutch.

Burst mode has value, but a lot of photographers who haven't bothered to learn how to see think that it's a way to avoid the effort of learning, and as such abuse it.

bittersweet• 16 years ago

To me, photography is all about thinking about the shot you are going to take. Things that people have mentioned before me, framing, lighting etc, this just takes the heart out of it in my opinion.

Also, I wonder if this is going to take users a lot longer to pick out photos. Even now with digital camera's and people shooting at will there is a whole lot of material to browse through to pick a few photos that are good.

gprisament• 16 years ago

There are a number of serious problems with this vision:

1) Of course the digital components of cameras (storage size, sensor resolution, processing power) will continue to improve at Moore's law pace, but optics is quickly becoming the limiting factor. In particular, diffraction limits sharpness as you increase depth-of-field (a result of the small aperture size) and the limited number of photons in dark scenes limits our high-ISO potential and resolution on small sensors.

2) "...the ability to keep everything viewable in focus at the same time".

Even if you could do this you wouldn't want to. Depth-of-field and focus point are some of the most important creative decisions a photographer makes per photo, and since they are "3D" phenomenon the effects cannot be accurately simulated during post-processing. (maybe stereoscopic cameras would be able to but then you need two lenses, which would add cost & weight in comparison to a "single" lens model)

3) "But perhaps the most radical thing about this camera is that it's really a camcorder. Rather than take individual stills, Wonder Camera owners would simply have their pick of perfectly crisp photos as frames grabbed from video."

Maybe, but there would have to be a way to have it integrate over several frames to get long-shutter-speed effects, and there would have to be a way to "tag" points in time so you're not sifting through hours of footage later to get the stills you wanted. Much of what this article proposes sounds like it just defers work (choosing aperture, choosing shutter speed, choosing point in time) to a later point, something I would NOT think photographers would want to do, since they already complain about how long post takes!

4) Finally, even this concept turns out to be 100% correct, I don't see it changing the art of photography all that much. As other people here mention, good photography is about good subject matter, framing the shot, clever use of lighting (whether artificial or available), post-processing to get the desired artistic effect, and being in the right place at the right time. Technology can certainly assist us with these things, but fundamentally it is these human element, not the technology, that makes photography what it is, and that won't change. As technology improves the photographer's decision process focuses less on making technical trade-offs (like shutter-speed vs aperture, high-ISO vs noise), but the creative aspects remain as important as ever.

lurkinggrue• 16 years ago

I'll stick to my 7D for now.

Photography is dead, long live photos

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