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Author Topic: The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming | TIME  (Read 30981 times)

Gulag

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The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming | TIME
« on: August 25, 2015, 01:13:58 pm »

“Except in photojournalism, there will be no such thing as a ‘straight photograph’; everything will be an amalgam, an interpretation, an enhancement or a variation – either by the photographer as auteur or by the camera itself.”

As we tumble forwards into these unknown territories there’s a curious throwback to a moment in art history when 100 years ago the Cubists revolutionized ways of seeing using a very similar (albeit analog) approach to what they saw. Picasso, Braque and others deconstructed the world and reassembled it not in terms of what they saw, but rather in terms of what they knew using multiple perspectives to depict a deeper understanding.

While the photographic world wrestles with even such basic tools as Photoshop there is no doubt that we’re moving into a space more aligned with Cubism than Modernism. It will not be long before our audiences demand more sophisticated imagery that is dynamic and responsive to change, connected to reality by more than a static two-dimensional rectangle of crude visual data isolated in space and time. We’ll look back at the black-and-white photograph that was the voice of truth for nearly a century, as a simplistic and incomplete source of information about what was happening in the world."

http://time.com/4003527/future-of-photography/
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"Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images."

— Jean Baudrillard

amolitor

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Re: The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming | TIME
« Reply #1 on: August 25, 2015, 07:47:52 pm »

Missing the forest for the trees.

There's a pretty standard spiel that says that somehow metadata is going to change everything. The most laughable variation on this I ever saw was in Wired, about shipping containers. "One day the information ABOUT a container will be worth more than then contents OF the container" -- think about that a little bit. How much would you pay for the location of a $100 bill? A thousand dollars? I wouldn't.

Anyways. I seem to recall this same basic thesis, that somehow the interlinking of photos with other data is going to change things. The GPS information, the time and date information, blah blah blah.

It's partly right, but it's missing the forest for the trees. A photo with a bunch of metadata attached is super aweZOM and COOL but it's not new. What's new is a billion photos (with, optionally, GPS information attached).

The challenge we face today is what it means to have a billion new photos an hour, with or without GPS data, time and date stamps, facial recognition. How to do we deal with this in our own lives? What does it mean for us? Even simple things like "I want to make a photo book out of the 2000 photos I have taken of my family over the last five years" are murderously difficult. Solving that problem seamlessly, easily, rendering that into a one-click solution is definitely going to require all that metadata, all that inter-app linkage. Pull the children's birth dates oout of the calender, correlate with time and date in the EXIF, and do some object recognition to find the cake and the pinata, pull together a nice little photo essay of the kid's 3rd birthday. There's chapter 3.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The essential point about revolutions is that you can't predict them. It'll be a year before we even notice that the new thing has taken over, and it'll be totally unexpected. Lytro is on to something, trying to make a new thing, but they missed the mark. Nobody wants an interactive still image that they can fiddle the DoF in. That's stupid. But there's *something* there, something new. And maybe it's a piece of the puzzle.

My thought is that the Lytro image is actually a meta-photo, used to generate contextually appropriate photos, as we struggle with the mass of pictures.

"Find me all the pictures of grandma" searches your archives using facial recognition. When it finds a Lytro file with grandma in it, it renders a picture with grandma in focus. In the context of another search, another large-scale multiple-image operation, it might render a totally different image.

The point, though, that the prognosticators are missing, is that it's about large scale multi image operations. Searches. Books. Albums. Slideshows. It's about sifting down a huge archive of picture data and generating the right ones used in the right way.

http://photothunk.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-future-of-imaging.html
http://photothunk.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-future-of-imaging-ii.html
http://photothunk.blogspot.com/2015/06/future-of-imaging-iii.html

for some disconnected and inconsistent thoughts along these lines.
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David Anderson

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Re: The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming | TIME
« Reply #2 on: August 26, 2015, 05:42:57 am »

The next revolution should be getting the shot right before butchering it in Photoshop and plastering it around social media like it's art.
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Isaac

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Re: The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming | TIME
« Reply #3 on: August 26, 2015, 11:59:59 am »

The point, though, that the prognosticators are missing…

All the prognosticators except you :-)
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Rob C

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Re: The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming | TIME
« Reply #4 on: August 28, 2015, 05:22:31 pm »

Not sure it makes sense to measure photographic innovation with the same tools as we do painting and drawing. Those arts were always open to being almost anything but representational, and so messed up faces etc. had a chance to find an audience willing to believe in them as something new, and worthy.

Neither am I certain that the same will ever really apply to photography. Even those early and horrid photographic Photoshop works with folks skiing over the Victoria Falls had a hard time being taken seriously after the first few months of such nonsense. Today, they are simply silly.

Black and white (and I must declare a general preference here) is already a far remove from reality, and offers the added advantage that it can make the less so appear beautiful by virtue of abstraction.

Colour, especially manipulated commercially, has already bumped into resistance; you just need to look at cosmetic ads and fashion spreads: those unreal, plastic puppets you see have zero appeal. You could use a store dummy, save a heap of money and who'd know? Not only that, but the ubiquity has made them ineffective as mediums of conviction. The next phase will probably be back to nature. Let's hope some unspoiled minds will be around and able to handle that.

Rob

Tim Lookingbill

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Re: The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming | TIME
« Reply #5 on: September 01, 2015, 05:46:38 pm »

Wow! Haven't been to Time.com or even read their magazine in a while, but that link doesn't provide scroll bars so I can read the entire article.

Waste of TIME.
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Isaac

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Re: The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming | TIME
« Reply #6 on: September 01, 2015, 11:57:38 pm »

… but that link doesn't provide scroll bars so I can read the entire article.

MS Vista, Firefox 40.0.3 -- Yes it does!

MS Vista, IE 9 -- Yes it does!

Apple iPad, Safari -- no scroll bars but still all readable!
« Last Edit: September 02, 2015, 12:08:41 am by Isaac »
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Tim Lookingbill

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Re: The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming | TIME
« Reply #7 on: September 02, 2015, 01:51:17 am »

MS Vista, Firefox 40.0.3 -- Yes it does!

MS Vista, IE 9 -- Yes it does!

Apple iPad, Safari -- no scroll bars but still all readable!

I knew it had to be something. I have Firefox set to automatically update in Mac OS 10.6.8, but for some reason it doesn't tell me when it was done.

Your response, Isaac, got me to check my Firefox version and sure enough there was a "Restart Firefox To Update" button highlight.

After doing that the Time article page updated with scroll bars and graphics on the left side. There's so much crap you have to keep in your head to operate a computer.
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Tim Lookingbill

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Re: The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming | TIME
« Reply #8 on: September 02, 2015, 01:53:53 am »

WTF?! I just clicked on the TIME article link in this thread and it's now back to no scroll bars.

Firefox 40.0.3 on a Mac.
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