What is a photo?
Back in the mists of time if you wanted to take a photograph you would have to use a camera that you had to carry with you.
It was a device dedicated to just taking photographs. It was much bigger than a mobile phone and you had to take time to compose the photograph you wanted. Only once you were happy would you press the button and usually take a single photograph. You would then only see the result of your work once you had taken all the photographs on the film (usually about 24 or 36) and then sent them off to be developed - which cost money.
Nowadays people can take out their phone and take as many photos as they want. There is essentially no cost, no delay and no effort involved.
A recent article in the Verge looked at how the three main mobile phone manufacturers defined a photo:
Samsung
Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce what you’re seeing, and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene — is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop.
“It’s about what you’re remembering,” he says. “When you define a memory as that there is a fallibility to it: You could have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt completely fake and completely wrong. What some of these edits do is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond.”
Apple
Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened. Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated.
When I take a photograph I try to use the minimal amount of features. Yes I use the flash, yes I use the zoom (including digital if I have to) and yes the phone does a lot of processing for me but I don’t use any filters or additional processing.
I might later use Luminar Neo to produce a version of the photo that has been tuned and looks nice but I still keep the original version.
Some of the new AI features such as the “Add Me” feature Google are pushing enter a grey area. There is a convenience to being able to do this and I can see why it might be useful but that picture never happened.
Throw in all the developments with images and video in the AI world and we are very quickly heading towards a world where “the camera never lies” becomes “the picture always lies”.
Links
Let’s compare Apple, Google, and Samsung’s definitions of ‘a photo’ - The Verge