I watched that video. It ignores the simplest explanation: money. They were selling to people taking photos of white people. Note that when there was demand for films which worked well with black subjects they produced films that worked well with black subjects.
My camera (EOS M3) doesn’t appear to.
It can be both. How does a camera know what white balance to set (assuming auto white balance mode)? It analyzes the picture. What’s one of the points of data it can use to take a good guess at the color temperature of the light source (or a guess at what would look most pleasing if a mix of differently color temperature light sources are involved)? Skin color.
Now do they do it this way? That I don’t know. Certainly the earlier digital cameras did not. I believe the usual way is to analyze the RGB channels and make a white balance guess based on their contours and how they should line up in a neutral color balanced setting. Today’s equipment could do more if they wanted to, but I don’t know how it’s done (or even if the companies explain their white balance technology.)
It’s not a crazy conspiratorial thought. Earlier color films were definitely tweaked to reproduce Caucasian skin tones pleasantly, as that is what sold the most film. So it’s certainly possible that skin tone can be taken into consideration.
More often what happens is, as you say, the exposure part of the automatic settings compensating for darker skin tones (which it doesn’t know are dark skin tones) by opening up the exposure and slightly-to-moderately overexposing the image.
That said, as a professional photographer, I shoot everything in raw and tweak white balances and color tones manually, so it wouldn’t make much a difference to me, but unconscious biasing towards making people of color look more “white” is absolutely something I am aware of and have to pay attention to.
I would say that the DMV does not fall afoul of anti-discrimination laws largely because it’s well-known that everyone’s DMV pictures suck. They are equal opportunity suck. I’m so white that I glow in the dark and you can barely tell where my lips are. Their cameras are bad, they have no professional training (our pictures are taken by Administrative Assistants) and they print it on old printers at ridiculously low resolutions. So, I’m going to say that for the DMV anyway, it’s not a race thing. It’s just a general trend of apathy toward what the pictures look like. At least these days they let us smile.
On a related note, photo ids themselves may be racist due to systemic barriers that make it more difficult for PoC to obtain them and make them generally less useful. That’s why voter id laws are so controversial.
From movies to TV to digital, a major focus has been on getting skin tone right. If skin tone is wrong, it really sticks out. A lot of factors got standardized and tweaked to achieve this. You could have the grass color off, but not skin tone.
Problem: “skin tone” means white skin tone. Getting other skin tones right wasn’t a priority.
I remember when the department I was at got it’s first digital camera. I was the first to figure out how to use it, get the pics off it, etc. So I naturally started taking pics of the faculty and students. White folk looked surprisingly good. Black people had barely visible features.
Taking good pictures of people of color can be done. E.g., Regina King was on Colbert the other night. She talked about how the cinematographer was one of the few people who could film black people right.
If the DMV or some such doesn’t have cameras that can take clear pictures for all citizens, then that needs to be fixed. It is definitely discriminatory.
Note that these pictures are not used just for the ID. They are also searched when looking for matches for suspects. Unclear pictures can lead to wrongful or missed arrests. If those mistakes occur more often for one class, that’s a real bad thing.
There’s the story Rodenberry tells about doing a screen test for the original Star Trek. they painted a dancing girl green and when the footage came back, she looked normal. They tried a few more times, with progressively greener makeup, until they figured out the lab was reprocessing the footage to ensure the girl had a proper skin tone. They told them not to re-adjust when printing the positive, and they got what they needed.
As mentioned above when taking pictures of darker skin in a bright white wedding dress, the issue is contrast range. Aim for too dark an overall picture and everything “white” is washed out. Aim for a lighter picture setting and the darker elements are lacking detail. Aim for a wide tone range and contrast between nearer tones is lost. You can see a similar issue when some less sophisticated digital cameras took flash pictures - a dark background caused the much nearer face to be all bright white. A white background, or someone too far form the flash, is all dark. (You know, the person holds their hand up - “don’t take my picture” and the hand is bright white and everything else is too dark). Photoshop - and as *pulykamell *says, raw - helps mitigate this.)
I would suggest what contributes to this is the tendency to photo against a white background (with flash). As a result, darker skin tones will be less detailed. For Canadian passport photos, for example, many of the setups I’ve seen include a flash behind/below the subject to ensure the background is bright white. I had a heck of a time getting a cream/yellow background for UK passport photos, it was always washed out.
The problem with any law would be enforcement. What constitutes a race-agnostic photo? Is every institutional photographer now required to be a photography expert? Does every location need an assortment of backgrounds - “Based on your perceived skin tone, you need a #3 background”? At a certain point, the law would be far too intrusive and arbitrary…
It’s true that photographic film printers used to be calibrated to caucasian skin.
But as others said, it’s objectively more difficult to photograph a dark colored subject properly. Ever tried to photograph a black cat or dog? You can play around with exposure compensation and fixed white balance, and it’ll still come out looking like a featureless black void.
The object of ID photos is not to make you look good. If you want that, go to a professional photographer. An ID photo is simply for general identification. My ID photos are rarely flattering.
I’ve done my share of wedding and portraits photography. It’s about contrast. The camera is looking for balance - not racial equality. I suggest the OP wear darker colored shirts if s/he is looking for a better photo when taking such photos.
This is an article about the video, for anyone not watching it. There is some useful information in the comments (buried in the usual crap that you might expect.)
Looking “good” and looking “visible” are two different things. Your post presupposes that the common photo standards are “normal” and if your picture doesn’t come out well you are not normal. That doesn’t seem right, to me.
Black people are normal people and normal equipment should be able to make them look normal without going to any sort of extensive tweaking.
And darker color shirts is not going to help one bit.
Since this is GQ, I will just say that no, there is no law prohibiting discrimination based on race that has been interpreted to require that a photographer have specific training to photograph non-white subjects.
Interestingly, virtually all of the appellate cases where white balance is mentioned are patent cases. The others are class action suits alleging that cameras had defective auto-balancing functions, and employment discrimination cases in which photographers were fired for (among other things) not balancing their whites properly.
White people hate their ID photos too. I suspect the incompetence of the “photographer” at the DMV, the poor equipment they use, and the non-ideal environment swamps any white-balance or f-stop settings problems that might exist.
[Moderating again]
In case there was any confusion, my previous moderator note was directed at D’Anconia. I should have said so at the time, but I was rushed, and didn’t notice that I omitted that.
I think it’s more that the DMV and any other ID photos use the picture as taken, rather than meddling with the settings. Changes - to camera or photo - requiring judgement by the photographer, leave too much room for error or misinterpretation. At least that awful ID is the fault of the equipment, not some incompetent photoshop wannabe.
But they aren’t usualyl unhappy because their face is barely there.
This is an entirely separate issue and people should really pay attention to this.
A camera on automatic settings will try to expose to the middle of the scene. Snow is often underexposed to grey, dark skin on a light background may be underexposed as well. One solution is to set the camera to spot or center weighted metering, another is more closely match the background to the subject.
Help me out, here. What do you mean by “If my ID is substantially less useful…”? Do you mean when you’re pulled over for a ticket and the cop says, “l’m sorry, but I can’t give you a ticket because I can’t tell if this picture on your license is really you”, or, perhaps, you go to the airport and the TSA guy says “Sorry, unless you can provide another form of ID, you can’t fly today because I can’t tell if this is really you in the picture or not”, or what?
Really, how does a bad picture on an ID make it substantially less useful?
I am responding to a hypothetical, not a situation that I know or suspect exists, but yes, that’s what I was going for. For example, imagine the cop says, “I’m sorry, but we can’t tell if it is you because the picture is so bad, so we’re going to have to detain you until we can verify your identity,” or the security guard at the courthouse won’t let you in to transact business unless you can provide another form of ID because your “Real ID” picture is only a dark blob. If that happens at random, then it is burdensome but not discriminatory. However, if it happens much more frequently to people with darker skin tones because of the DMV choosing to use cameras optimized for fair skin (wittingly or not), then people with a particular racial/ethnic background are disproportionately burdened.
I’ve not experienced problems myself, so I don’t know how realistic a scenario this might be (and also, I’m pretty fair-skinned, so I’m unlikely to have this particular problem anyway). However, the need for photo IDs is becoming more pressing: voting, boarding an airplane, visiting federal buildings, picking up certain prescription or OTC medications, etc. If your ID is not routinely accepted because people think it doesn’t look like you (or doesn’t look like anybody human) then it is substantially less useful than an ID more widely accepted.
If there were any law, I would think it would be more about making sure you have a good quality ID, so part of the ID laws to make sure you photograph every subject with good contrast.
As for lobbying for such, I think it might not be a bad idea for black people to lobby, or for places that accept IDs to lobby saying that the way the photos are taken, it’s harder to see if a black ID is of the person.
Also, as far as I know, cameras tend to auto white balance off of what is included in the photo, so stuff about a darker background and darker clothes would indeed be useful. But, ideally, you’d have someone there who would just look at the photo and adjust the settings or lighting to make sure that your features are clearly visible before taking the photo.
There’s also the other option, where they are too permissive with harder to see IDs, and then people get away with fake IDs.
I’m not a pro, but an enthusiastic amateur, and this is definitely my experience.
The extent to which you have to adjust white balances, color, and exposure often depends not just on the skin tone of the face, but on how large the face is within the picture, what the lighting source was, the colors the pattern of lights and shadows on the surrounding parts of the image, etc., etc.
When I’m processing my RAW files, I make a conscious effort to think about the skin tones of the people in the picture, and to try and reproduce them. With dark-skinned people like African Americans, Indians (South Asian, not Native American), and other similar groups, I don’t want to lighten their skin too much, but I also don’t want to make them appear too dark. This can sometimes be hard, and it’s also sometimes a bit difficult to be consistent from picture to picture, especially with odd lighting sources.
Here’s a couple of galleries of my pictures from the last year, and each has quite a lot of pictures of dark-skinned people.
The first is from a rally in Sacramento by students and faculty of the California State University. There are quite a lot of African American, Latino, Asian, and mixed-race people in this group. I think, for the most part, that I got the skin tones pretty accurate in this set, helped by the fact that I was using the natural light of a somewhat cloudy day, which gives nice and consistent results.
The second gallery is backstage at an Indian dance recital. This one was much harder, and there’s some evidence of that in the end product. In addition to a variety of different skin tones, from white through to very dark, I was also dealing with the effects of the rather elaborate makeup, as well as multiple different light sources. There were tungsten lights and fluorescent lights, sometimes there was natural light coming in through the door, and for some pictures I was also using a flash unit.
And if there are problems or inconsistencies here, it’s probably also due to the fact that I’m also not a pro with Adobe Lightroom. I would benefit from some more training on it. 