Happy Easter, everybody! Today, I’d like to try out the “gallery” feature on Substack, with some of my own, original photography:
These pics were all taken by me over the last few months while taking our dog (Stinky) on his morning walks around the big park by our place. We get up early, so a lot of times I see the sunrise (he doesn’t - he’s blind). It’s a beautiful park, and sunrises provide good light conditions for photography.
I really like the way these turned out. In fact, I’m pleased with the overall quality of all my photos since August of 2022. What happened in August? Well, to understand, you need to know that in 2014, I took a photography course at the local community college. It was a helpful course, but I think that all of that knowledge needed to marinate in my subconscious for some time. Approximately 8 years later, in August of 2022, my photography knowledge finally blossomed. That’s why these photos are turning out so well.
Coincidentally, also in August 2022, I happened to buy a new phone. But it was an iPhone SE, which has an old camera, so that fact must be irrelevant.
For those who aren’t aware, the iPhone SE is a sort of odd compromise phone that Apple offers, where they take very dated hardware, and stuff in the latest chip and software. This saves me money, while still giving me a high performance phone that can run apps fast and flawlessly. It’s something like taking an old Toyota Camry and stuffing a Porsche Taycan powertrain inside. It looks old and boring, but it is very fast.
My iPhone SE is, thus, not considered to have a cutting-edge camera. It’s got just one single lens, and that’s a lens which has been sitting around in the Apple parts drawer for many moons.
Even so, it is true that the photos I’m taking with this phone are the greatest photos I’ve ever been able to take in my life. And while I’d like to think that’s because my skill level as a photographer has grown (what with my community college photography course credentials and all), the truth is, it is at least in some part, the phone.
The trick is that it’s not the phone hardware; it’s the software. Yes, the reason my photos are looking so nice probably has a lot to do with the “Porsche Taycan” level chip and software in my Camry-looking iPhone.
It’s called “computational photography.” Our friend Marques Brownlee summarized computational photography like this.
“The stuff that comes out of a smartphone camera isn’t so much reality, as much as it’s this computer’s interpretation of what it thinks you’d like reality to look like.”
I’d never heard of computational photography until 2019. I was shopping for a new phone, and was interested in the Pixel 3A. The reviews kept saying things like, “This phone takes amazing pictures. The lens is actually just so-so, but Google has great computational photography to make up for it, and the photos turn out better than any other smartphone.”
Now it’s everywhere, and it’s creating some funny dilemmas. Recently, there was an enjoyable controversy surrounding Samsung’s phones. People were posting beautifully detailed photos of the moon, taken by leveraging the phone’s allegedly phenomenal zoom abilities. But then, somebody on Reddit ran an experiment, using the Samsung to zoom in on a blurry photo of the moon. The phone delivered a more detailed picture of the moon than the photo it was, in reality, pointed at. The phone was looking at the blurry photo, and “fixing” it.
It makes one wonder how much this is happening, in more subtle ways. How much of the photos we take are reality? How much of the gallery I posted above really comes from my expertise? How much of it is originally “my” art, vs how much of it is a decision made by programmers and AI? Do I even care?
It gets a little dicier when you take pictures of people. I’ve been in a couple of those photo booths they have at wedding receptions, and those definitely go to work on me. It whitens my teeth, turns up the blue hue on my eyes, and smooths and oranges my skin. In other words, it shows you what I would look like if, in 25 years, I am a successful politician being discussed as a running mate in an upcoming presidential election.
I don’t think I mind what computational photography does. As for the portraits of humans, my gut instinct is that we’ll always know and prefer the real deal, over computer optimized portraits. We always have - overly doctored portraits have been around a long time, and we’ve called foul on those for years. When it comes to photos of sunrises, I think it’s all well and good. Professional photographers have been doing this sort of thing for decades as well. There still is some expertise needed from me, to decide how to frame my shots and know what sort of subjects my phone will thrive with.
In short, doctoring and retouching photos in post has been a thing for probably exactly as long has photography has been a thing. Some images we prefer to see that way, like sunsets and landscapes. Others have always looked silly, like mall glamour shots. Computational photography is doing nothing new - it just does it faster.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. What do you think? Are the photos in my gallery even any good in the first place, regardless of whether I get credit?