I miss my stop bath…
But my ACDSee is awesome!
Dead horse, I beats it: 10 tips for taking great holiday iPhone photos – Mostly Lisa | Photography tips & travel inspiration
Those are pretty much generic photography tips, they have little to do with the iPhone specifically. Certainly they are tailored to the iPhone UI, but you can use the 2 second timer for a shutter release just like you can use the headphones for the iPhone.
It’s not a bad set of suggestions, and they will certainly produce more interesting photos. But 99% of people won’t bother with any of them, they’ll just pose people in front of things and snap away.
Ok, well not everyone is that skilled at photoshop. And still there are instances where you can’t fake it, like taking photos through a cage.
You normally take hundreds or thousands of pictures if you want to do a digital reconstruction. Even with a laser scanner, you might have to move the scanner several times to fill in all of the dead spots. I expect that eventually the camera will direct you to the locations to take the pictures until we can get a flying camera drone to fly around and take the pictures for us.
So, if I take a picture from every possible position, then I can choose which postion after the fact to “take” the picture 
Why do you think you can’t fake that? In most cases the people who care about photos are actually pretty skilled with image editing tools.
Not every position, but enough that the software can interpolate. Of course, we will also have group sourcing for the photos where the software can take the pictures from many different camera and construct the picture you want.
Of course, the first rule of photography is, “have a camera”. Even professionals will carry pocket cameras around so they “have a camera”.
If its a complicated scene you can’t interpolate away your problems. Pretty soon interpolating just means making stuff up that hopefully still looks sorta real. And this assumes the scene is static (doesnt change with time).
Sure, if I take a mostly empty big room with just interesting pictures on the wall and set up a camera/scanner system I can go back after the fact and recreate the scene from virtually every point of view. But its still going to take someone with a “photographic” eye to find the interesting views.
Now, rather than a big room, lets imagine a forest with rocks, bolders, a creek, a cliff or two, and some bushes. How many different positions are you going to have images/scan from to reasonably cover all possible points of view. A BUNCH. And even if you do that, you are STILL going to need someone with a photographic eye to find the interesting views. And again time isn’t being accounted for either.
Yeah, if you record the beejessus out the real world you can recreate it after the fact. But at some points its probably easier to just use the real thing the first time around IMO.
Or a database so complete that you don’t have to take ANY photos…why lug a camera around Rome when thousands have before ya?
Already done. You ever enable the photo view in Google Earth? The resolution on the Street View keeps improving also.
I doubt it got a good picture of that pretty tree frog on my front porch this morning.
Yeah all this database photo 3 D recreation stuff will make people who just want touristy snap shots much happier and better “photographers”. But IMO you just aint going to record enough detail from a enough positions to replace actual boots on the ground photography that isnt touristy snap shot level but good photography instead.
And even if you did, you’d now just have a “photographer” wandering around in a virtual space looking for that perfect shot rather than in the real world. The crappy photographers that can’t take a nice shot with even a really good fully automated under good conditons aren’t going to do much better in a virtual world.
I think it’s cute that you don’t think your “photographic eye” can’t be replaced by computer. We are living in the future right now. Look at what Canon S100 can do right now. The average person is already better off leaving the camera in automatic mode and letting the camera make most of the decisions. Within 10 years Siri like technology will be making photographic decisions for people. Most people aren’t really interested in photography. They just want a nice picture.
I’d suggest reading Vernor Vinge’s novel “Rainbows End”.
A very rough calculation. Lets pick one moment in time and take a high resolution image of the United States. We want to do this so that we have this massive photo data base. This way 30 year old guys living in their mom’s basement can run around in a virtual world to " take" neat photos.
By my calculations, that would require roughly 100 terabytes of imagery for every person in the United States. And this for only one perspective and one point in time. Throw in time and multiple perspectives and a few other things and you are up many more orders of magnitude.
Even without time and multiple perspectives thats still a crapload of imagery to collect and go through looking for interesting stuff.
The camera is only going to capture images where the user points it. The fact remains that even with the most fancy DSLRs most people just take snapshots. Technology isn’t going to change that, and that’s fine. Most people just want snapshots. They’re in better focus now, and the color balance is better, and they’re are fewer clipped highlights, but they’re still snapshots.
Automatic modes won’t make artistic decisions, that’s not their job. They won’t compose a shot, or direct the subject, or change the lighting to evoke a mood. You can do some of that in post processing, but again, most people don’t because they’re not interested in doing so. The camera isn’t the limiting factor in taking great photos, it’s the time necessary to learn photography principles.
If I did the math right (and if my assumptions were reasonable) to gather enough 3D imagery to allow you to “stroll” (with some kinda googles/glasses I suppose) through a computer generated hi def recreation of the United States (just the outdoors mind you) would take something like 10,000 terabytes per person. Thats a stack of 4 meg CDs about 1500 miles high (per person).
Yes. Technique is the easy part of photography. Any idiot can make a sharp, perfectly exposed, and otherwise technically impeccable picture of total crap. Photography is still “light writing,” and learning how to read and use light creatively is a basic photography skill no camera, no matter how advanced, will ever teach you. What I want from my gear is for it to not get in my way, to make the technical side of photography as automatic and brainless as possible, so I could concentrate on finding the moment, the light, the composition, etc.; so I can interact with my subjects, get them comfortable, and shoot seamlessly at the same time, without worrying too much about focus and exposure.
YES! That’s the best explanation I’ve seen so far. I don’t want the gear to get in the way. For me, personally, that means physical controls for shutter speed and aperture immediately available, and an absolute minimum of different settings, programs, menus and other BS. The more “features” a camera has, the less I want to use it.