12 ms·

Two Photographers Unknowingly Shot the Same Millisecond in Time

1397 points by shawndumas 9y ago

DennisAleynikov 9y ago
that is absolutely incredible! Very happy they actually figured out its not a copy and different lightroom effects. It did seem slightly different positions in the original compressed images.
iamalchemist 9y ago
Wow!
murukesh_s 9y ago
5d's image looks remarkably better in terms of colour depth and details.. wondering whether it's due to the sensor size (full frame vs aps-c) or some other factor?
- sgk284 9y ago
  As is shared in the article, the largest contributing factor is likely how Lightroom was used during post-processing.
  - antongribok 9y ago
    Although there are differences in post-processing, you can see significant differences in quality in the zoomed-in crop: https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/03/Compare_with_circles.jpg https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/03/Compare_with_ci... This is not surprising considering we're comparing a 60D that was released in Aug 2010 and a 5D4 released 6 years later.
    - pizza234 9y ago
      That's true, but Risman is clearly very liberal with photoshopping ("moon-stitching" liberal), and it seems to me that that's the largest factor. The turquoise tone in the waves has been overlayed (it's fake, in other words), and I bet other areas of the photo has been very heavily modified in an artificial way. I would be curious though to read a professional analysis, since this is a very interesting (and I think rare) case of how a photo looks before and after fabric... I mean, after "art has been applied". /s (Also, I wonder if Risman used a polarizing filter, while Gendron didn't, as it generally contributes to this type of difference (deeper blue tones, and increased resolution due to dehazing)).
- tlrobinson 9y ago
  Are you just looking at the low resolution images in the article? If so, I think most of it can be attributed to post-processing. At that resolution the sensor size isn't going to make a big difference.
  - murukesh_s 9y ago
    But I wonder why I cant get the same "look" (despite post-processing for ever) similar to the wallpapers of yesteryear which were mostly 720p :)
- kabouseng 9y ago
  The histogram could just be stretched differently for both photos. By changing the gain and offset of the picture, you could possibly get more closely matched photos.
- dancek 9y ago
  A photographer makes a lot of decisions before collecting the data (ie. shooting) and a lot more in post-processing. Framing and timing the shot are some of the most important ones, and here they were almost exactly the same. But even at the time of shooting, given the same equipment, you'd have the choice of aperture, shutter speed, sensitivity (ISO). Also things like whether your lens is in the sun or the shade may affect the result tremendously. If you made these choices well, you have unspoiled data with a good dynamic range, and that allows all kinds of post-processing. And of course post-processing is an art in itself. What I'm trying to say is, photography is more about skill than equipment. In the given situation there was a lot of light so even a relatively bad camera equipment would have sufficed.
- rangibaby 9y ago
  I will edit this to reply properly later but from the pic it looks like the main difference is the lens
isubkhankulov 9y ago
The skeptic in me thinks this was planned. Yellow submarining given that the author is selling something
- DennisAleynikov 9y ago
  would be insane if it were a marketing stunt too! Taking the same picture of the same moment of a huge unplanned wave would be a feat worth of the marketing purpose.
  - cozzyd 9y ago
    Well you could trigger pictures from the same clock and wait until something interesting happened...
    - y4mi 9y ago
      the article says that at least ron was shooting for 45 minutes. Which is an average time, but if you consider how many photos a modern camera takes per second... its technically possible to plan, but just as likely to happen on accident. And its definitely a wonderful example why the idea of intellectual property for photographs is a flawed concept. But its not an easy topic and photographers still need to earn their living. That means some protection from publishers that just take their shots without paying.
- lopmotr 9y ago
  Suggesting something on the internet is fake is a fool's errand. Anybody can do it about anything so it's worthless. What else might be fake? The story that it happened? Maybe he just took one photo and photoshopped it! Maybe it's not really a photographer at all. Maybe you live in the Matrix. This kind of reasoning goes down a black hole to nowhere. You have to maintain a basic level of trust in the source of information if you're going to have any interesting thoughts about it. Finding actual evidence of fakery would be worthwhile, or checking some features and reporting how you found none would be too. But there's no value suggesting it just because you feel cynical.
cozzyd 9y ago
Not nearly as improbable, but one time I was reading the New York Times and happened upon the top picture in this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/insider/freezing-temperatures-glacial-winds-volcanic-dust-all-in-a-days-work-for-a-times-team-in-antarctica.html?smid=pl-share https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/insider/freezing-temperat... Not only did I find that I was (barely) in the picture, but I had a picture of the photographer either before or after he took that picture (not at the same time, obviously, since I was turned the other way at the time of his picture): http://kicp.uchicago.edu/~cozzyd/coincidence.jpg http://kicp.uchicago.edu/~cozzyd/coincidence.jpg
- marknadal 9y ago
  Wow, what was working in Antarctica like?
  - cozzyd 9y ago
    I was working on a long-duration balloon payload (ANITA-IV), so I was in a hangar much of the time. Since it was summer, it wasn't that cold, but the constant daylight is disorienting. The isolation from the rest of the world is the hardest part, even though at McMurdo, unlike pole, there is (slow) internet all day long. McMurdo is an interesting place with a lot of fascinating people and the scenery is very beautiful. As our balloon launched pretty quickly after we were ready to launch, I unfortunately didn't get much downtime to do all of the hiking trails and such (but on the plus side, I got to go home earlier). If you ever get a chance to go (either as a scientist or, possibly more likely for many, as support staff), I highly recommend it.
    - GuiA 9y ago
      Maciej Ceglowski wrote about McMurdo: http://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm http://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm
    - nolok 9y ago
      Always been a dream of mine, sadly I don't think as a lowly French IT person that there is a way for me to have that experience. Thanks for sharing
kgp7 9y ago
If you look at the waves in the water you can tell they are different.
alex_young 9y ago
The waves look very different, especially on the left side
arthurofbabylon 9y ago
Totally cool, but not unlikely. With the sheer volume of high-end cameras and photographers using burst mode, this will certainly happen time and time again. It’s likely that this happens several times most days. Some simple math: one camera was taking a photo every 143 milliseconds (roughly) and the other every 196 milliseconds (roughly). If both sit in burst mode continuously, I would expect these cameras to share the same millisecond (meaning each photograph took place within 1 millisecond of the other) every 28,000 milliseconds (roughly) or every 28 seconds. I’d also argue that the details of this ‘unplanned’ event increased the likelihood that two photographers would select the same photo out of a series of bursts - didn’t the author say only about 3 images came out nice? Well, I imagine the other photographer had the same experience.
- raisedbyninjas 9y ago
  https://www.theonion.com/police-slog-through-40-000-insipid-party-pics-to-find-c-1819594819 https://www.theonion.com/police-slog-through-40-000-insipid-...
anonymfus 9y ago
Maybe somebody could use these photos to legally destroy concepts of creative input / originality in non staged photography and remove copyright protection from such works.
neilwilson 9y ago
Law of large numbers. It's why we exist at all.
cbaleanu 9y ago
When I first joined my local photographer's club, one of the masters there told me that I need to accept that all the photos I will take will have been probably already shot by someone else. Obviously not that realistic, but articles like this sure make it sound more plausible.
- prayerslayer 9y ago
  > all the photos I will take will have been probably already shot by someone else > Obviously not that realistic Depends on how literally you want to take it. Lighthouses have definitely been photographed before. Photos depicting the man vs wild nature archetype too.
TehCorwiz 9y ago
This has always been one of my favorite photographic coincidences. https://calculatedimages.blogspot.com/2013/05/3d-lightning.html https://calculatedimages.blogspot.com/2013/05/3d-lightning.h...
- lervag 9y ago
  Google Chrome thinks this site is dangerous: Your connection is not private Attackers might be trying to steal your information from calculatedimages.blogspot.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID The message details continues to say that > You cannot visit calculatedimages.blogspot.com right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later.
  - NinjaKitten 9y ago
    Are you sure you don't have a configuration error on your end? Time set correctly etc? Maybe some MITM on your network? Dodgy SSL certs in your OS? Blogspot is a google operated domain after all.
  - bjpbakker 9y ago
    The certificate is signed by a Google intermediate CA using GlobalSign as the root CA. I don't use Chrome but I find it hard to believe that Chrome now distrusts Google's own CAs. A user errors seems more likely :)
    - nolok 9y ago
      For the record : those two parts (their CA / own services, and their teams responsible for security) are really well separated and it is not the first time a Google thingy is deemed unsafe by Google security. Whatever one thinks of Google, it's hard to not agree that they take security very seriously, both internal and external (and project zero is one of the best thing ever). Personally, I prefer it that way. Better to see "ahah, Google tells me Google is insecure" than allowing something flagged as bad just because it come from the same mothership.
goblin89 9y ago
Two professional photographers having independently selected the exact same frame from two different bursts they captured with their cameras is an interesting instance, illustrating the pro-AI argument in photography and possibly adjacent creative domains. Grossly simplified, two humans went through dozens or hundreds of shots with identical internal “algorithm” and did the same work twice. This shows that the algorithm can be “abstracted away”, and the work can be done for them by the machine. I can roughly see the counter-argument to be made, considering true creative self-expression and art losing value as its hardest aspect becomes optional (“natural selection” of produced work via artist’s taste)—but it’s hard to argue, in the light of this example, that professionals would find such a tool indispensable.
- gjulianm 9y ago
  Sorry but I do not agree at all. First, the fact that they chose the same photo might not necessarily mean that photo is the "optimal choice" according to some algorithm: it can perfectly be a coincidence. I find it even more improbable that a tool that selects "the best photo of a bunch" is useful for a significant portion of the photographers (as in "it gives results according to their tastes") unless it takes into account only basic measures and they can use it in specific instances (e.g. find the photo with the best light exposure).
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    > First, the fact that they chose the same photo might not necessarily mean that photo is the "optimal choice" according to some algorithm: it can perfectly be a coincidence. Well, obviously it does mean that; the photo was the optimal choice according to the two algorithms used by those photographers to choose their picture. Does that mean it would also be selected by another equally good or superior algorithm? No. But it does necessarily mean that the photo is the optimal choice according to two algorithms.
    - ada1981 9y ago
      The algorithm could simply be "randomly select an image from all the burst frames."
comex 9y ago
Literally the same millisecond (according to timestamps), or ‘only’ the same tenth of a second or so (as demonstrated by the pictures being near identical)? Those would both be unlikely and remarkable events, but one is 100 times more unlikely than the other :)
- aidenn0 9y ago
  Timestamps are not useful for this since the cameras clocks are likely off by more than a millisecond. I think a millisecond is too strong of a claim, but it's almost certainly much less than 1/10th of a second. (a simple though experiment that you could turn into a real experiment if you have a camera: If you take a 1/10th second exposure of something like this the magnitude of the motion blur will be much greater than the differences between the wave shapes on the two cameras).
  - carlmr 9y ago
    So if two people are shooting in burst mode, and both have an overlap in their shooting burst of say 2 seconds with 5 images per second. Then the chances is already (2 * 5)/1000 to land a picture in the same millisecond. You'd expect in 100 burst of pictures taken like this for one to be taken at the same millisecond. It's not that unlikely. What's more unlikely is that they selected the same shot and found out about it. This probably happens multiple times every day, just by virtue of the billions of people in the world taking a photo every day.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  No more than 1/100s apart.
  - nwellnhof 9y ago
    My guess is that the water doesn't move much faster than 10 m/s which translates to 1 cm/ms. You certainly can't make out 1 cm differences in the images, so the "same millisecond" claim is definitely exaggerated. From a quick look, the time difference could even be more than 10 ms, but not by much.
cbsmith 9y ago
Alternate title: two photographers learn about the birthday paradox...
- carlmr 9y ago
  Exactly. This guy statistics.
- spuz 9y ago
  Not really. The birthday paradox is a paradox because it describes a circumstance that seems unlikely but actually is not. In this case it both seems unlikely and IS unlikely. If it were not unlikely we would see it happen more often.
  - carlmr 9y ago
    Like I posted somewhere else here, it likely happens hundreds of times a day (going by millisecond granularity and # of photos being taken per day in close vicinity in the world). That people afterwards see each others photos and find out about it is rather unlikely. It probably happens most days in the Louvre at the Mona Lisa. Although she doesn't move very much.
    - exodust 9y ago
      So it's a publishing coincidence rather than a photographic one.
  - cbsmith 9y ago
    It's unlikely that it would happen for any given shot, but it is very unlikely that it would never happen across all shots taken, which is the crux of the birthday paradox.
lobster_johnson 9y ago
Cool idea for a service like Flickr (or at least Flickr in its prime, which is not now) to exploit -- given EXIF data and a database of photos, one could find all the photos taken in the same location at the exact time. While almost no cameras embed GPS information, I bet there are ways to infer the location in many cases.
- phamilton 9y ago
  This was in fact the business of the infamous Color startup[0]. For those not familiar, they raised a ridiculous amount of money, then shut down and returned most of it to the investors. My favorite memory of Color was when they became a landmark when they bought a massive office in downtown Palo Alto, got hit with zoning restrictions which forced them to use the ground floor for retail or leave it empty (they left it empty). [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs
  - overcast 9y ago
    I had a similar project prior to Color coming out with it. No one seems to care about proximity photos for events.
garyfirestorm 9y ago
We are sorry about that glitch in the matrix.
skrebbel 9y ago
This is typical birthday paradox stuff right? The chance that these two photographers would ever snap the same thing at the same time is small, but the chance that any two photographers, anywhere, would do so is, I bet, pretty big (even if you factor in millisecond precision). With photographers being photographers and the internet being the internet, there's also a pretty decent change that they'd find out about it and write a blog post like this, no? :-)
- gpvos 9y ago
  Correct, but there are about eight orders of magnitude more milliseconds than days, and you need another two or so orders of magnitude because not everyone is a photographer who publishes their photos. Then again, the internet is a medium that reaches many more people, which is not true of the average birthday. So one would still expect this to happen only maybe every few years.
  - JepZ 9y ago
    Well, but I am not sure that you would indeed require it to be the same millisecond. I mean I don't know how long the exposure was, but I guess its longer than a millisecond (just took a look at some of my own photos and they were at 4-5ms exposure in very bright sunlight, the blog image exposure is probably more like 10ms). The heading says that the pictures were taken in the same millisecond, but as far as I understand the post, they concluded it from the image, so I wonder what the precision is you can derive from a photo?
    - smichel17 9y ago
      They said they compared EXIF metadata, so they should know when each of the shots were taken. I'm not a photographer and don't know what level of detail is recorded there, though.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        The time in the EXIF metadata is just based on the time/date stamp that's been set in the camera. I don't know about the newer Canon but I'm pretty sure the older model would just be something someone manually set. Re-reading the article, I think saying the pics were shot at the "same millisecond" was just a colloquial expression to mean the look of the waves makes it look as if they were shot at the exact same time. They shared metadata but that seems to have been to share the other shooting parameters. I believe (and this would seem to confirm [1]) that EXIF timestamp data is only precise down to 1 second. added: and only as accurate as the photographer who set the date and time. [1] https://www.media.mit.edu/pia/Research/deepview/exif.html https://www.media.mit.edu/pia/Research/deepview/exif.html
burfog 9y ago
Copyright requires original artistic expression. If two people do the exact same thing, that is in doubt.
lmnt 9y ago
It's possible to judgde the relative positions of the photographers by eye based on some of the waves directly under the lighthouse. In Eric's picture there are some distinct crests immediately below the lighthouse door. In Ron's picture the exact same crests are on a diagonal line from the door toward the lower left corner of the frame. Tracing this imaginary line "out of the picture" would lead us to Eric's position, which means that Eric is to the left of Ron.
thinkloop 9y ago
Wasn't he shooting continuously for 45 minutes? That's 3% of a day. Wouldn't he have a shot of the same millisecond of any photos taken during that time?
- rangibaby 9y ago
  There are 1000 ms per second, the camera he used takes 7 frames per second.
  - thinkloop 9y ago
    With the described margin of error, that would be more than enough for "identical" photos.
- lopmotr 9y ago
  He only chose one to post online. So it's much less likely than that.
jv22222 9y ago
A few months back I gave a Trader Joe's blueberry muffin to my son. https://www.fooducate.com/app#!page=product&id=B7329F0C-B3E6-11E2-9B11-1231381A4CEA https://www.fooducate.com/app#!page=product&id=B7329F0C-B3E6... As usual I cut it in half straight down the middle. As usual I paid no attention to cutting it. I was just about to hand it to him when I noticed something strange, so I quickly took a photo... https://www.dropbox.com/s/8tjrwql37i7ujjn/muffin.jpg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/8tjrwql37i7ujjn/muffin.jpg?dl=0 The chances of the cut aligning the way it did, the blueberries lining up the way they did, the cut cutting the blueberries exactly in half, the blueberries ending up in this exact formation, me buying this specific muffin, the rotation of the muffin when I cut it.... Well, it just seems impossibly unlikely for something like this to have happened, yet it did!
- stctgion 9y ago
  The fact that the blueberries sunk to the bottom could indicate that there was too much liquid in the mixture
gpvos 9y ago
I find it fascinating that the waves look so different when photographed from a slightly different position. Maybe the waves also change faster than the spray around the lighthouse?
- bschwindHN 9y ago
  The closer you are to something, the more quickly it appears to "move" when you shift your viewing position. The waves are much closer than the lighthouse so as you move left or right, their perceived position moves more quickly than the lighthouse. I guess the technical term is parallax?
  - gpvos 9y ago
    Yes, when looking more thoroughly I could recognize the waves in the two images, indeed moved quite a bit.
ScottBurson 9y ago
I would love to see these in a stereoscopic viewer. If they really were taken that close together in time, and given the huge binocular separation, there should be a hell of a 3-D effect.
- sambeau 9y ago
  If you squint your eyes enough you can make them overlap and sure enough you get a perfect piece of 3D. The water at the front is a mess but the lighthouse and the spray have real depth.
- panic 9y ago
  Check out the comments at the bottom of the article -- "trialex" put together a "wiggle gif" version (https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/42ab07151119e1a3d5a43faabdeee0d2ffe523624565abc2206c37966793bb16.gif https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/42ab07151119e1a3d5a43fa...) and "Michael Wise" posted a cross-eyed version (https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2903120ac9e726088a33b8de9c30e703b297242a95d294371e5d3b6855605517.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2903120ac9e726088a33b8d...).
  - pure-awesome 9y ago
    Wow! They should make this into an actual one of those stereographic pictures!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
asafira 9y ago
While the coincidence is real ... why couldn't these shots have been 1 millisecond off from one another? The shutter times are short enough for it... I know it's nit-picking, but why make that the title? Otherwise, it's also definitely worth noting that these were shot with burst mode, so that the chance of this happening is ~.7% --- definitely very unlikely, but still much more likely than most rare events you read about in the news.
iampari 9y ago
Amazing how different cameras capture the same picture from almost the same angle at the exact same time in totally different color tones
- kornakiewicz 9y ago
  I believe its's more due to post-processing in Lightroom.
Jetroid 9y ago
Reminds me of the time when my sister and I took pictures with very similar composition of the sky - and you can see the same clouds in each photo. https://jetholt.com/connected-minds/ https://jetholt.com/connected-minds/ I love things like this.
- exodust 9y ago
  Sorry but this is not coincidental or crazy in the slightest! You both snapped a picture of the sky minutes apart on your way home because the sky looked nice. Okay, so what? There is nothing unusual about that. The photos are different. Clouds in different positions, different focal length... I don't see "connected minds". I see "hey, cool sky" [whips out smartphone, snaps photo].
  - Jetroid 9y ago
    Compared to the source article, it's relatively mundane. I don't claim otherwise. I'm not a photographer. I don't claim to be. Maybe this event I experienced seems much more common for someone who describes themself with 'dev/design/photo/animation', but for me it seemed pretty unlikely. I don't take photos often (The last photo I took in my gallery of my smartphone is dated December 2017). The crazy thing for me and my experience was how close in time the two images were (considering neither of us are photographers/regularly take photographs), and how you can match the patterns in the sky to estimate my position relative to hers. Something like this had never happened to me before. One man's junk is another's treasure and all. :)
    - exodust 9y ago
      Sure, okay... all good and no offense intended, but... . > I don't claim otherwise You kind of did by making a web page called 'connected minds', saying "something crazy happened today", describing the photos as same clouds and "near identical", then sharing the link. Be prepared for feedback when you do that! This isn't about me asserting myself as photographer in the room. We all carry cameras. It sounds like you both live at same location, you were on way home, snapped photo of sky at similar times, as probably others in your neighborhood did. I'm not calling that "junk", I'm just not sure the claims you make equal the event! But let's move on.. all the best, take more photos! I checked out your homepage... Wow, now that is crazy! :)
erric 9y ago
You can get a nice magic eye effect from the photos, too.
JepZ 9y ago
I wonder why they had to look at the iron bars to find the difference in position. If you look at the waves in the foreground the difference is very obvious. Nevertheless, quite cool incident. Not just that they took a very similar photo, but also that they found out that they did.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  The author addresses the displacement of the foreground waves: "I know those things are easily moved using the clone stamp in Photoshop", and he demonstrates it in the accompanying video.
  - JepZ 9y ago
    Yeah, but that is related to the photo being a rip off. Manipulating the bars in the tower would be even simpler.
    - michrassena 9y ago
      One thing I do for a hobby in addition to my usual interest in photography is enhance images in the public domain (e.g. combine the color separations of Prokudin-Gorskii's images into color images, merge multiple images to reduce noise or create a panoramic image, or find stereo pairs of images a lay them out for cross-eye viewing -- so in the same spirit, without as much work as those who colorize historic images). With that background, it's apparent there should be enough parallax, even given the long distance to the subject due to the claimed distance between photographers to create a stereo pair using the two images (some photographers make hyper-stereo images of mountains and clouds). If one image were derived from the other, it should be obvious -- the differences between the images would only be skin deep, e.g. the waves in the foreground, the different position of the bars at the top of the tower, but the entire body of the wave would be identical. Overlaying them and subtracting the difference, it can be seen that there are slight variations across the entire image, and when viewed as a stereo pair, there is an obvious stereo effect, the platform in front of the tower appears in space in front, the wave appears to wrap around the tower. What we're left with is the story that these two photographers didn't coordinate their images. I see no reason to disbelieve this. Like was stated elsewhere in this thread, the title is incorrect and the images weren't taken the same millisecond, so that makes the story less remarkable.
mimr9 9y ago
that was stunning!
hamoid 9y ago
In 2006 I shot a different kind of coincidence that made me wonder about the uniqueness of our actions: 10 minutes apart, two unknown men walking on a street, both with jeans, black jackets, white hoodie/cap, black shoes, the same leg in front and with their feet on the same spots on the ground: https://hamoid.com/post/2006-07-dimensions-of-the-city/ https://hamoid.com/post/2006-07-dimensions-of-the-city/ (photos #7 and #8)
- teel 9y ago
  Off topic, but I am trying to get my head around the photo #14, it's almost like an optical illusion but not quite! Looks almost like a photo that has been mirrored vertically but since the men are in different position, the halves must be different photos (one mirrored). How did you get the hoses line up at the middle position? I'd like to hear how this photo was created!
Aardwolf 9y ago
" ... the lighthouse had slightly different spacing between the vertical bars compared to my image. This would indicate that the other photographer was likely standing just a little bit left of where I was standing." I could already tell that from the shift of the white caps on the waves midway in the ocean
imron 9y ago
I'm reminded of that quote by Gordon Letwin talking about software bugs and rare events - "in our business one in a million is next Tuesday" This was the next Tuesday of the photography world.
abdulhaq 9y ago
The amazing thing here is not that they took a photo of the same thing at the same time, but that this fact was discovered. With the vast data capture exercise that is the internet, coincidences and patterns can be identified in near real time. Making sense of it all, however, is not so quick :-)
yangyang 9y ago
I had the same thing happen with one of my photos of lightning in London. I actually thought my shot had been ripped off at first glance, then realised it was from a different angle. Mine: https://www.flickr.com/photos/beechlights/2739042419/in/photolist-5b3iTi-5bn2YL-5b7BMC-5b3iCe-83tPjj https://www.flickr.com/photos/beechlights/2739042419/in/phot... Alternative, from the Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/earth/2515652/Summer-lightning-over-southern-England.html?image=7 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/earth/2515...
- ger_in_no 9y ago
  Looks at first sight like much of a bigger coincidence, but given that you probably both used a long shutter speed (yours seems to have been 6s) and selected the nicest of a number of shots, it's not like there are crazy chances against getting two almost identical shots like this.
  - yangyang 9y ago
    Oh yeah, I don't deny it isn't insanely improbable. Still, finding same strike in a newspaper, shot from a very similar angle, was quite surprising.
    - tabio 9y ago
      Nice quadruple-negative.
      - craigds 9y ago
        Surprisingly readable!
  - herogreen 9y ago
    Actually that could be much more likely if both used automated triggering.
    - 9y ago
brudgers 9y ago
[I felt like I was playing "Find 8 differences between these pictures" on the comics page] I looked at the large images. Gendon's appears to have been shot slightly earlier based on two differences. 1. The crest of the background wave at the left is horizontal in Gendon's photo and turning down from photo left to right in Risman's. 2. The trough in front of the breaking wave has reached the front of the light house in Gendon's photo exposing a sunlit rock at the lower left of the low circular structure. A rock broke wave is most photogenic at the moment of maximum spray extent. The water is at lowest velocity and the gestalt shape is briefly frozen...then gravity dominates and the moment collapses. The shape of the spray is the second most stable element in the scene. While it is the defining photographic moment, it is not clock correlated down at the millisecond level.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  I looked at the two photos as a stereogram--focus through the plane instead of crossing your eyes. If they were identical, there would be no 3d effect. My eyes can't figure out how to resolve the foreground waves, because the photographers were too far apart, but the spray wraps around the lighthouse as you would expect.
  - elijahparker 9y ago
    This is a great effect! The resulting image is quite stereoscopic (in an exaggerated way) and you can see the stone structure as clearly in front of the lighthouse as well
  - cecilpl2 9y ago
    As a side note, it is possible to train yourself to stereogram your eyes at will (I've done it). This makes "spot the difference" puzzles a triviality. Which is, in itself a triviality, but an entertaining one.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      The carpet in my office frequently fools my eyes into the wrong focus. I have been tempted to use a marker to leave a secret message in it for my successor, but that seems like more work than my actual job.
mrfusion 9y ago
This would make an interesting copyright case.
- 5555624 9y ago
  Except that the two pictures are not exactly the same. Once you start looking for differences, you find small ones. For example, the article points out the two differences in the lighthouse. In the foreground of Gendman's picture is a whitecap that is on the left in Risman's picture.
- cooper12 9y ago
  I found some discussion of copyright infringement by imitation here: https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=scholarship#page=19 https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&con.... [0] In general it seems to be fine to photograph the same object as an earlier copyrighted work, as long as "original aspects" are not copied such as lighting or placement of the subject. The lighting is different here, though the placement barely differs. There's also not a clear "first" since the photographs were taken almost simultaneously. I think at the end of the day, a judge would chock up any alleged infringement as de minimis. [1] This also brings to mind the image of paparazzi or sports photographers all in a narrow press area rapidly shooting off pictures. I don't think any of them have had trouble selling their photographs to agencies despite being in the same location and capturing the same subject simultaneously. [0]: Kogan, Terry S., "How Photographs Infringe" (2017). Utah Law Faculty Scholarship. 20. https://dc.law.utah.edu/scholarship/20 https://dc.law.utah.edu/scholarship/20 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis#Copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis#Copyright
Sarve6 9y ago
This is one of a rare coincidence.
jordache 9y ago
the same sub second... splash's movement frozen in time is not at the ms level precision.... Also the scenario described here is not that rare.. Once you have two photogs there that day, your chances of getting the same shot is already pertty good. The two photographers were essentially firing off continuous shots when they anticipate a wave hitting... Everyone was focused on the lighthouse...
linkmotif 9y ago
> and ultimately we both selected the same photo from that day to promote. That’s the funnest thing about this story imo. These kinds of photographers shoots hundreds or thousands of photos in half an hour. It’s wild they were both struck by one particular exposure.
rqs 9y ago
I don't know what come to your mind after reading that article, but mine was: Oh man! Canon 5D Mark IV is truly far better than 60D. Shopping cart added.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mcbits 9y ago
  That is one hell of an impulse buy. Would you care to hear my sob story and startup idea?
patorjk 9y ago
I had a similar thing happen. While browsing Google Maps I found what looked like a poorly cropped version of one of my photos: My photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/40423570@N07/35437050686/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/40423570@N07/35437050686/ Their photo: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fort+Armistead+Park/@39.2088089,-76.5366746,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipMPspVZ2yDYFzRhYdxSFvjOvJXZdFpSih51WqAC!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMPspVZ2yDYFzRhYdxSFvjOvJXZdFpSih51WqAC%3Dw203-h114-k-no!7i5312!8i2988!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c801efdd1d2c55:0x9329693e99d0e4b0!8m2!3d39.2092808!4d-76.5355479 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fort+Armistead+Park/@39.20... However, upon inspection I realized there were differences. It kind of blew my mind that someone had taken a picture of the same sunrise at the same time, from almost the same spot.
- ghaff 9y ago
  >It kind of blew my mind that someone had taken a picture of the same sunrise at the same time, from almost the same spot. Depends on the spot. I'm sure that, on any given morning, there are probably shots taken in a place like Zabriskie Point that are effectively indistinguishable. (Of course, once there are moving objects in the frame, photos that look identical become much less likely.)
  - patorjk 9y ago
    That's true, though this particular spot isn't very popular. Until recently, I'd never seen someone else take a sunrise shot from this particular point of view (the beginning of summer is when the sun is closest to the bridge, and it only rises close enough for a good sunrise photo for around 2 weeks). And when I took my shot, I actually thought I was alone in the park.
  - smsm42 9y ago
    I remember going to the tour in Arizona & Utah (Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Zion Park, etc.) and in every scenic spot there were dozens of people with cameras virtually all the time. And when the sunset came, you had to get the good spots in advance because there were even more people trying to take a good shot. So there probably are hundreds of similar photos of these places out there. Still nothing like seeing it all with your own eyes though :)
me_again 9y ago
http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/102182393150/vemödalen-n-the-fear-that-everything-has http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/102182393150/... is a lovely philosophical rumination on this kind of thing.
jastanton 9y ago
I once plugged my usb cable in on the first try. Goes to show you anything is possible!! Edit: upon further inspection it turns out it was USB-C. Nevermind, all is right with the world :)
- LesZedCB 9y ago
  i know it's a joke, but the usb logo on the plug is always on top, so you can just orient it 'up' according to the underlying board (up for laptops, and facing left for desktops)
  - tambourine_man 9y ago
    Apple cables have their logo and USB, if I recall correctly, and they always get me confused.
  - tabio 9y ago
    Ok I'll open up my computer case to see which way the board is mounted.
    - sudojudo 9y ago
      He already told you, left is up. The side of your case that has the motherboard's backplate (where you plug everything in) is the bottom. On the vast majority of towers, the plate is on the right side, meaning left is up. EDIT: right/left when looking at the front of the case.
  - mod 9y ago
    Yeah, but then you're just guessing at the orientation of the board, so it's still anyone's guess.
- diggan 9y ago
  Something I learned a few weeks ago (after many years of using USB) is that usually cables have the USB logo or marking on the "right side" up. So if you don't know which one is the right side up, the one with the logo should win. Might help some other lost souls here :)
danschumann 9y ago
I'm glad this isn't a horror story about one person suing another, thinking they had stolen their shot. Happenstance fun-ness is better!
hi41 9y ago
This made me so happy! I have a glee from ear to ear!
imagetic 9y ago
This happens a lot. You could probably find 20 photographers in my area who capture frames with the same timestamp during a sunset by a lighthouse.
sparkzilla 9y ago
Snap!
politician 9y ago
If two photographers shoot the same millisecond in time, who owns the copyright? In this example, there were discernible differences, but what if the differences were below our level (or care) to discern them?
- publicfig 9y ago
  No one would likely have copyright over the actual event (or if they did, it would be a separate discussion). Each photographer could have copyright over their image they took.
  - politician 9y ago
    Even though their images are identical?
omgPhysics 9y ago
Same millisecond? Prove it... I would buy same 10ms. If two cameras with frame rates of about 8frames/sec were shooting at random, the probability that they are in the same millisecond is very low, like 1.5% or so. If they were in the same 10ms interval... more like 14.5%! Actually not that low, and the apparent difference in the waves might not actually be significant in 10ms (supposing the water was at it's maximum height 10ms^2*9.8m/s2=>less than a mm of movement!). Suppose that within a cm the photographs look the same, then this implies a time interval (at max water height) of 31ms. Over 31ms given the snapshot intervals there is about 38% chance of the photos being of the same 'moment'.
intrasight 9y ago
I see a lot of differences in the waves, so I'm doubting the "exact millisecond" statement. Perhaps within a few tens of milliseconds.
- rsp1984 9y ago
  I think that difference is due to the different photographer view points. Both observers center on the lighthouse but from different standpoints. Everything in front of or behind the lighthouse will look different, even if they caught the exact same nanosecond.
ronreiter 9y ago
Statistically, this is actually really not that surprising. Both photographers take multiple shots with a short shutter, usually from the same places, and usually trying to pick the same events. So the only coincidence is basically having two photographers be at the same place and time.
conmarap 9y ago
That's very interesting. Try to think of what the probability of that happening is.
wellboy 9y ago
Acshually...this happens thousands of times every day, due to a phenomenon called collisions.
Aloha 9y ago
This would be the perfect occasion to make a stereoscopic image.
juanmirocks 9y ago
With probably hundreds of photographers at pretty crowded/famous spots (say sports, famous buildings, or nature places) and using long shutter speeds, should not these improbable coincidences be not so improbable?
- estebank 9y ago
  It's a picture of waves crashing at high shutter speeds to be able to sharply capture the scene. having the same picture of a person (slow moving) or a lightning (slow shutter speeds) is much easier.
jaxtellerSoA 9y ago
And Ron is the better photographer. The other photo is a little bit over exposed. This assumes that both photos were not edited.
- cphoover 9y ago
  Ron already admitted his was edited with adobe lightroom.
sib 9y ago
Things move a lot in a millisecond, although it's certainly easier to see that in small-scale images rather than this lighthouse one. https://sib.smugmug.com/Sports/Baseball/SEA-DET/i-jhrMkC3/A https://sib.smugmug.com/Sports/Baseball/SEA-DET/i-jhrMkC3/A This is a picture that I took in 2009; you can see the ball coming off Ken Griffey's bat after breaking it. A major league fastball comes off the bat at 100+ miles per hour (45 m / s). The shutter speed was 1/640s (about 1.5 msec). The ball is about 7.26 cm in diameter.
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  Nice example. To make your point clearer: that motion blur is how much the ball moved in just 1.5ms
  - sib 9y ago
    Exactly, thanks for clarifying. And also why I was shooting with single shots to try to time the ball close to the bat. Given a camera that took about 5 frames per second (200msec between frames), the ball would move about 29 feet (8.8m) in between frames. The breaking bat was a nice surprise.
ehosca 9y ago
this is really not all that hard to do ... all you need are 2 photographers equipped with cameras that can to better than 12 frames per second (EOS 1Dx for example) and fire away simultaneously at the same subject ... then go through the bursted images and find the files that match ...

1397 points by shawndumas 9y ago

that is absolutely incredible! Very happy they actually figured out its not a copy and different lightroom effects. It did seem slightly different positions in the original compressed images.

iamalchemist 9y ago

Wow!

murukesh_s 9y ago

5d's image looks remarkably better in terms of colour depth and details.. wondering whether it's due to the sensor size (full frame vs aps-c) or some other factor?

sgk284 9y ago
As is shared in the article, the largest contributing factor is likely how Lightroom was used during post-processing.
- antongribok 9y ago
  Although there are differences in post-processing, you can see significant differences in quality in the zoomed-in crop: https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/03/Compare_with_circles.jpg https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/03/Compare_with_ci... This is not surprising considering we're comparing a 60D that was released in Aug 2010 and a 5D4 released 6 years later.
  - pizza234 9y ago
    That's true, but Risman is clearly very liberal with photoshopping ("moon-stitching" liberal), and it seems to me that that's the largest factor. The turquoise tone in the waves has been overlayed (it's fake, in other words), and I bet other areas of the photo has been very heavily modified in an artificial way. I would be curious though to read a professional analysis, since this is a very interesting (and I think rare) case of how a photo looks before and after fabric... I mean, after "art has been applied". /s (Also, I wonder if Risman used a polarizing filter, while Gendron didn't, as it generally contributes to this type of difference (deeper blue tones, and increased resolution due to dehazing)).
tlrobinson 9y ago
Are you just looking at the low resolution images in the article? If so, I think most of it can be attributed to post-processing. At that resolution the sensor size isn't going to make a big difference.
- murukesh_s 9y ago
  But I wonder why I cant get the same "look" (despite post-processing for ever) similar to the wallpapers of yesteryear which were mostly 720p :)
kabouseng 9y ago
The histogram could just be stretched differently for both photos. By changing the gain and offset of the picture, you could possibly get more closely matched photos.
dancek 9y ago
A photographer makes a lot of decisions before collecting the data (ie. shooting) and a lot more in post-processing. Framing and timing the shot are some of the most important ones, and here they were almost exactly the same. But even at the time of shooting, given the same equipment, you'd have the choice of aperture, shutter speed, sensitivity (ISO). Also things like whether your lens is in the sun or the shade may affect the result tremendously. If you made these choices well, you have unspoiled data with a good dynamic range, and that allows all kinds of post-processing. And of course post-processing is an art in itself. What I'm trying to say is, photography is more about skill than equipment. In the given situation there was a lot of light so even a relatively bad camera equipment would have sufficed.
rangibaby 9y ago
I will edit this to reply properly later but from the pic it looks like the main difference is the lens

isubkhankulov 9y ago

The skeptic in me thinks this was planned. Yellow submarining given that the author is selling something

DennisAleynikov 9y ago
would be insane if it were a marketing stunt too! Taking the same picture of the same moment of a huge unplanned wave would be a feat worth of the marketing purpose.
- cozzyd 9y ago
  Well you could trigger pictures from the same clock and wait until something interesting happened...
  - y4mi 9y ago
    the article says that at least ron was shooting for 45 minutes. Which is an average time, but if you consider how many photos a modern camera takes per second... its technically possible to plan, but just as likely to happen on accident. And its definitely a wonderful example why the idea of intellectual property for photographs is a flawed concept. But its not an easy topic and photographers still need to earn their living. That means some protection from publishers that just take their shots without paying.
lopmotr 9y ago
Suggesting something on the internet is fake is a fool's errand. Anybody can do it about anything so it's worthless. What else might be fake? The story that it happened? Maybe he just took one photo and photoshopped it! Maybe it's not really a photographer at all. Maybe you live in the Matrix. This kind of reasoning goes down a black hole to nowhere. You have to maintain a basic level of trust in the source of information if you're going to have any interesting thoughts about it. Finding actual evidence of fakery would be worthwhile, or checking some features and reporting how you found none would be too. But there's no value suggesting it just because you feel cynical.

cozzyd 9y ago

Not nearly as improbable, but one time I was reading the New York Times and happened upon the top picture in this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/insider/freezing-temperatures-glacial-winds-volcanic-dust-all-in-a-days-work-for-a-times-team-in-antarctica.html?smid=pl-share https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/insider/freezing-temperat... Not only did I find that I was (barely) in the picture, but I had a picture of the photographer either before or after he took that picture (not at the same time, obviously, since I was turned the other way at the time of his picture): http://kicp.uchicago.edu/~cozzyd/coincidence.jpg http://kicp.uchicago.edu/~cozzyd/coincidence.jpg

marknadal 9y ago
Wow, what was working in Antarctica like?
- cozzyd 9y ago
  I was working on a long-duration balloon payload (ANITA-IV), so I was in a hangar much of the time. Since it was summer, it wasn't that cold, but the constant daylight is disorienting. The isolation from the rest of the world is the hardest part, even though at McMurdo, unlike pole, there is (slow) internet all day long. McMurdo is an interesting place with a lot of fascinating people and the scenery is very beautiful. As our balloon launched pretty quickly after we were ready to launch, I unfortunately didn't get much downtime to do all of the hiking trails and such (but on the plus side, I got to go home earlier). If you ever get a chance to go (either as a scientist or, possibly more likely for many, as support staff), I highly recommend it.
  - GuiA 9y ago
    Maciej Ceglowski wrote about McMurdo: http://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm http://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm
  - nolok 9y ago
    Always been a dream of mine, sadly I don't think as a lowly French IT person that there is a way for me to have that experience. Thanks for sharing

kgp7 9y ago

If you look at the waves in the water you can tell they are different.

alex_young 9y ago

The waves look very different, especially on the left side

arthurofbabylon 9y ago

Totally cool, but not unlikely. With the sheer volume of high-end cameras and photographers using burst mode, this will certainly happen time and time again. It’s likely that this happens several times most days. Some simple math: one camera was taking a photo every 143 milliseconds (roughly) and the other every 196 milliseconds (roughly). If both sit in burst mode continuously, I would expect these cameras to share the same millisecond (meaning each photograph took place within 1 millisecond of the other) every 28,000 milliseconds (roughly) or every 28 seconds. I’d also argue that the details of this ‘unplanned’ event increased the likelihood that two photographers would select the same photo out of a series of bursts - didn’t the author say only about 3 images came out nice? Well, I imagine the other photographer had the same experience.

raisedbyninjas 9y ago
https://www.theonion.com/police-slog-through-40-000-insipid-party-pics-to-find-c-1819594819 https://www.theonion.com/police-slog-through-40-000-insipid-...

anonymfus 9y ago

Maybe somebody could use these photos to legally destroy concepts of creative input / originality in non staged photography and remove copyright protection from such works.

neilwilson 9y ago

Law of large numbers. It's why we exist at all.

cbaleanu 9y ago

When I first joined my local photographer's club, one of the masters there told me that I need to accept that all the photos I will take will have been probably already shot by someone else. Obviously not that realistic, but articles like this sure make it sound more plausible.

prayerslayer 9y ago
> all the photos I will take will have been probably already shot by someone else > Obviously not that realistic Depends on how literally you want to take it. Lighthouses have definitely been photographed before. Photos depicting the man vs wild nature archetype too.

TehCorwiz 9y ago

This has always been one of my favorite photographic coincidences. https://calculatedimages.blogspot.com/2013/05/3d-lightning.html https://calculatedimages.blogspot.com/2013/05/3d-lightning.h...

lervag 9y ago
Google Chrome thinks this site is dangerous: Your connection is not private Attackers might be trying to steal your information from calculatedimages.blogspot.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID The message details continues to say that > You cannot visit calculatedimages.blogspot.com right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later.
- NinjaKitten 9y ago
  Are you sure you don't have a configuration error on your end? Time set correctly etc? Maybe some MITM on your network? Dodgy SSL certs in your OS? Blogspot is a google operated domain after all.
- bjpbakker 9y ago
  The certificate is signed by a Google intermediate CA using GlobalSign as the root CA. I don't use Chrome but I find it hard to believe that Chrome now distrusts Google's own CAs. A user errors seems more likely :)
  - nolok 9y ago
    For the record : those two parts (their CA / own services, and their teams responsible for security) are really well separated and it is not the first time a Google thingy is deemed unsafe by Google security. Whatever one thinks of Google, it's hard to not agree that they take security very seriously, both internal and external (and project zero is one of the best thing ever). Personally, I prefer it that way. Better to see "ahah, Google tells me Google is insecure" than allowing something flagged as bad just because it come from the same mothership.

goblin89 9y ago

Two professional photographers having independently selected the exact same frame from two different bursts they captured with their cameras is an interesting instance, illustrating the pro-AI argument in photography and possibly adjacent creative domains. Grossly simplified, two humans went through dozens or hundreds of shots with identical internal “algorithm” and did the same work twice. This shows that the algorithm can be “abstracted away”, and the work can be done for them by the machine. I can roughly see the counter-argument to be made, considering true creative self-expression and art losing value as its hardest aspect becomes optional (“natural selection” of produced work via artist’s taste)—but it’s hard to argue, in the light of this example, that professionals would find such a tool indispensable.

gjulianm 9y ago
Sorry but I do not agree at all. First, the fact that they chose the same photo might not necessarily mean that photo is the "optimal choice" according to some algorithm: it can perfectly be a coincidence. I find it even more improbable that a tool that selects "the best photo of a bunch" is useful for a significant portion of the photographers (as in "it gives results according to their tastes") unless it takes into account only basic measures and they can use it in specific instances (e.g. find the photo with the best light exposure).
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > First, the fact that they chose the same photo might not necessarily mean that photo is the "optimal choice" according to some algorithm: it can perfectly be a coincidence. Well, obviously it does mean that; the photo was the optimal choice according to the two algorithms used by those photographers to choose their picture. Does that mean it would also be selected by another equally good or superior algorithm? No. But it does necessarily mean that the photo is the optimal choice according to two algorithms.
  - ada1981 9y ago
    The algorithm could simply be "randomly select an image from all the burst frames."

comex 9y ago

Literally the same millisecond (according to timestamps), or ‘only’ the same tenth of a second or so (as demonstrated by the pictures being near identical)? Those would both be unlikely and remarkable events, but one is 100 times more unlikely than the other :)

aidenn0 9y ago
Timestamps are not useful for this since the cameras clocks are likely off by more than a millisecond. I think a millisecond is too strong of a claim, but it's almost certainly much less than 1/10th of a second. (a simple though experiment that you could turn into a real experiment if you have a camera: If you take a 1/10th second exposure of something like this the magnitude of the motion blur will be much greater than the differences between the wave shapes on the two cameras).
- carlmr 9y ago
  So if two people are shooting in burst mode, and both have an overlap in their shooting burst of say 2 seconds with 5 images per second. Then the chances is already (2 * 5)/1000 to land a picture in the same millisecond. You'd expect in 100 burst of pictures taken like this for one to be taken at the same millisecond. It's not that unlikely. What's more unlikely is that they selected the same shot and found out about it. This probably happens multiple times every day, just by virtue of the billions of people in the world taking a photo every day.
ggg9990 9y ago
No more than 1/100s apart.
- nwellnhof 9y ago
  My guess is that the water doesn't move much faster than 10 m/s which translates to 1 cm/ms. You certainly can't make out 1 cm differences in the images, so the "same millisecond" claim is definitely exaggerated. From a quick look, the time difference could even be more than 10 ms, but not by much.

cbsmith 9y ago

Alternate title: two photographers learn about the birthday paradox...

carlmr 9y ago
Exactly. This guy statistics.
spuz 9y ago
Not really. The birthday paradox is a paradox because it describes a circumstance that seems unlikely but actually is not. In this case it both seems unlikely and IS unlikely. If it were not unlikely we would see it happen more often.
- carlmr 9y ago
  Like I posted somewhere else here, it likely happens hundreds of times a day (going by millisecond granularity and # of photos being taken per day in close vicinity in the world). That people afterwards see each others photos and find out about it is rather unlikely. It probably happens most days in the Louvre at the Mona Lisa. Although she doesn't move very much.
  - exodust 9y ago
    So it's a publishing coincidence rather than a photographic one.
- cbsmith 9y ago
  It's unlikely that it would happen for any given shot, but it is very unlikely that it would never happen across all shots taken, which is the crux of the birthday paradox.

lobster_johnson 9y ago

Cool idea for a service like Flickr (or at least Flickr in its prime, which is not now) to exploit -- given EXIF data and a database of photos, one could find all the photos taken in the same location at the exact time. While almost no cameras embed GPS information, I bet there are ways to infer the location in many cases.

phamilton 9y ago
This was in fact the business of the infamous Color startup[0]. For those not familiar, they raised a ridiculous amount of money, then shut down and returned most of it to the investors. My favorite memory of Color was when they became a landmark when they bought a massive office in downtown Palo Alto, got hit with zoning restrictions which forced them to use the ground floor for retail or leave it empty (they left it empty). [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs
- overcast 9y ago
  I had a similar project prior to Color coming out with it. No one seems to care about proximity photos for events.

garyfirestorm 9y ago

We are sorry about that glitch in the matrix.

skrebbel 9y ago

This is typical birthday paradox stuff right? The chance that these two photographers would ever snap the same thing at the same time is small, but the chance that any two photographers, anywhere, would do so is, I bet, pretty big (even if you factor in millisecond precision). With photographers being photographers and the internet being the internet, there's also a pretty decent change that they'd find out about it and write a blog post like this, no? :-)

gpvos 9y ago
Correct, but there are about eight orders of magnitude more milliseconds than days, and you need another two or so orders of magnitude because not everyone is a photographer who publishes their photos. Then again, the internet is a medium that reaches many more people, which is not true of the average birthday. So one would still expect this to happen only maybe every few years.
- JepZ 9y ago
  Well, but I am not sure that you would indeed require it to be the same millisecond. I mean I don't know how long the exposure was, but I guess its longer than a millisecond (just took a look at some of my own photos and they were at 4-5ms exposure in very bright sunlight, the blog image exposure is probably more like 10ms). The heading says that the pictures were taken in the same millisecond, but as far as I understand the post, they concluded it from the image, so I wonder what the precision is you can derive from a photo?
  - smichel17 9y ago
    They said they compared EXIF metadata, so they should know when each of the shots were taken. I'm not a photographer and don't know what level of detail is recorded there, though.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      The time in the EXIF metadata is just based on the time/date stamp that's been set in the camera. I don't know about the newer Canon but I'm pretty sure the older model would just be something someone manually set. Re-reading the article, I think saying the pics were shot at the "same millisecond" was just a colloquial expression to mean the look of the waves makes it look as if they were shot at the exact same time. They shared metadata but that seems to have been to share the other shooting parameters. I believe (and this would seem to confirm [1]) that EXIF timestamp data is only precise down to 1 second. added: and only as accurate as the photographer who set the date and time. [1] https://www.media.mit.edu/pia/Research/deepview/exif.html https://www.media.mit.edu/pia/Research/deepview/exif.html

burfog 9y ago

lmnt 9y ago

It's possible to judgde the relative positions of the photographers by eye based on some of the waves directly under the lighthouse. In Eric's picture there are some distinct crests immediately below the lighthouse door. In Ron's picture the exact same crests are on a diagonal line from the door toward the lower left corner of the frame. Tracing this imaginary line "out of the picture" would lead us to Eric's position, which means that Eric is to the left of Ron.

thinkloop 9y ago

Wasn't he shooting continuously for 45 minutes? That's 3% of a day. Wouldn't he have a shot of the same millisecond of any photos taken during that time?

rangibaby 9y ago
There are 1000 ms per second, the camera he used takes 7 frames per second.
- thinkloop 9y ago
  With the described margin of error, that would be more than enough for "identical" photos.
lopmotr 9y ago
He only chose one to post online. So it's much less likely than that.

jv22222 9y ago

A few months back I gave a Trader Joe's blueberry muffin to my son. https://www.fooducate.com/app#!page=product&id=B7329F0C-B3E6-11E2-9B11-1231381A4CEA https://www.fooducate.com/app#!page=product&id=B7329F0C-B3E6... As usual I cut it in half straight down the middle. As usual I paid no attention to cutting it. I was just about to hand it to him when I noticed something strange, so I quickly took a photo... https://www.dropbox.com/s/8tjrwql37i7ujjn/muffin.jpg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/8tjrwql37i7ujjn/muffin.jpg?dl=0 The chances of the cut aligning the way it did, the blueberries lining up the way they did, the cut cutting the blueberries exactly in half, the blueberries ending up in this exact formation, me buying this specific muffin, the rotation of the muffin when I cut it.... Well, it just seems impossibly unlikely for something like this to have happened, yet it did!

stctgion 9y ago
The fact that the blueberries sunk to the bottom could indicate that there was too much liquid in the mixture

gpvos 9y ago

I find it fascinating that the waves look so different when photographed from a slightly different position. Maybe the waves also change faster than the spray around the lighthouse?

bschwindHN 9y ago
The closer you are to something, the more quickly it appears to "move" when you shift your viewing position. The waves are much closer than the lighthouse so as you move left or right, their perceived position moves more quickly than the lighthouse. I guess the technical term is parallax?
- gpvos 9y ago
  Yes, when looking more thoroughly I could recognize the waves in the two images, indeed moved quite a bit.

ScottBurson 9y ago

I would love to see these in a stereoscopic viewer. If they really were taken that close together in time, and given the huge binocular separation, there should be a hell of a 3-D effect.

sambeau 9y ago
If you squint your eyes enough you can make them overlap and sure enough you get a perfect piece of 3D. The water at the front is a mess but the lighthouse and the spray have real depth.
panic 9y ago
Check out the comments at the bottom of the article -- "trialex" put together a "wiggle gif" version (https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/42ab07151119e1a3d5a43faabdeee0d2ffe523624565abc2206c37966793bb16.gif https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/42ab07151119e1a3d5a43fa...) and "Michael Wise" posted a cross-eyed version (https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2903120ac9e726088a33b8de9c30e703b297242a95d294371e5d3b6855605517.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2903120ac9e726088a33b8d...).
- pure-awesome 9y ago
  Wow! They should make this into an actual one of those stereographic pictures!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

asafira 9y ago

While the coincidence is real ... why couldn't these shots have been 1 millisecond off from one another? The shutter times are short enough for it... I know it's nit-picking, but why make that the title? Otherwise, it's also definitely worth noting that these were shot with burst mode, so that the chance of this happening is ~.7% --- definitely very unlikely, but still much more likely than most rare events you read about in the news.

iampari 9y ago

Amazing how different cameras capture the same picture from almost the same angle at the exact same time in totally different color tones

kornakiewicz 9y ago
I believe its's more due to post-processing in Lightroom.

Jetroid 9y ago

Reminds me of the time when my sister and I took pictures with very similar composition of the sky - and you can see the same clouds in each photo. https://jetholt.com/connected-minds/ https://jetholt.com/connected-minds/ I love things like this.

exodust 9y ago
Sorry but this is not coincidental or crazy in the slightest! You both snapped a picture of the sky minutes apart on your way home because the sky looked nice. Okay, so what? There is nothing unusual about that. The photos are different. Clouds in different positions, different focal length... I don't see "connected minds". I see "hey, cool sky" [whips out smartphone, snaps photo].
- Jetroid 9y ago
  Compared to the source article, it's relatively mundane. I don't claim otherwise. I'm not a photographer. I don't claim to be. Maybe this event I experienced seems much more common for someone who describes themself with 'dev/design/photo/animation', but for me it seemed pretty unlikely. I don't take photos often (The last photo I took in my gallery of my smartphone is dated December 2017). The crazy thing for me and my experience was how close in time the two images were (considering neither of us are photographers/regularly take photographs), and how you can match the patterns in the sky to estimate my position relative to hers. Something like this had never happened to me before. One man's junk is another's treasure and all. :)
  - exodust 9y ago
    Sure, okay... all good and no offense intended, but... . > I don't claim otherwise You kind of did by making a web page called 'connected minds', saying "something crazy happened today", describing the photos as same clouds and "near identical", then sharing the link. Be prepared for feedback when you do that! This isn't about me asserting myself as photographer in the room. We all carry cameras. It sounds like you both live at same location, you were on way home, snapped photo of sky at similar times, as probably others in your neighborhood did. I'm not calling that "junk", I'm just not sure the claims you make equal the event! But let's move on.. all the best, take more photos! I checked out your homepage... Wow, now that is crazy! :)

erric 9y ago

You can get a nice magic eye effect from the photos, too.

JepZ 9y ago

I wonder why they had to look at the iron bars to find the difference in position. If you look at the waves in the foreground the difference is very obvious. Nevertheless, quite cool incident. Not just that they took a very similar photo, but also that they found out that they did.

mannykannot 9y ago
The author addresses the displacement of the foreground waves: "I know those things are easily moved using the clone stamp in Photoshop", and he demonstrates it in the accompanying video.
- JepZ 9y ago
  Yeah, but that is related to the photo being a rip off. Manipulating the bars in the tower would be even simpler.
  - michrassena 9y ago
    One thing I do for a hobby in addition to my usual interest in photography is enhance images in the public domain (e.g. combine the color separations of Prokudin-Gorskii's images into color images, merge multiple images to reduce noise or create a panoramic image, or find stereo pairs of images a lay them out for cross-eye viewing -- so in the same spirit, without as much work as those who colorize historic images). With that background, it's apparent there should be enough parallax, even given the long distance to the subject due to the claimed distance between photographers to create a stereo pair using the two images (some photographers make hyper-stereo images of mountains and clouds). If one image were derived from the other, it should be obvious -- the differences between the images would only be skin deep, e.g. the waves in the foreground, the different position of the bars at the top of the tower, but the entire body of the wave would be identical. Overlaying them and subtracting the difference, it can be seen that there are slight variations across the entire image, and when viewed as a stereo pair, there is an obvious stereo effect, the platform in front of the tower appears in space in front, the wave appears to wrap around the tower. What we're left with is the story that these two photographers didn't coordinate their images. I see no reason to disbelieve this. Like was stated elsewhere in this thread, the title is incorrect and the images weren't taken the same millisecond, so that makes the story less remarkable.

mimr9 9y ago

that was stunning!

hamoid 9y ago

In 2006 I shot a different kind of coincidence that made me wonder about the uniqueness of our actions: 10 minutes apart, two unknown men walking on a street, both with jeans, black jackets, white hoodie/cap, black shoes, the same leg in front and with their feet on the same spots on the ground: https://hamoid.com/post/2006-07-dimensions-of-the-city/ https://hamoid.com/post/2006-07-dimensions-of-the-city/ (photos #7 and #8)

teel 9y ago
Off topic, but I am trying to get my head around the photo #14, it's almost like an optical illusion but not quite! Looks almost like a photo that has been mirrored vertically but since the men are in different position, the halves must be different photos (one mirrored). How did you get the hoses line up at the middle position? I'd like to hear how this photo was created!

Aardwolf 9y ago

" ... the lighthouse had slightly different spacing between the vertical bars compared to my image. This would indicate that the other photographer was likely standing just a little bit left of where I was standing." I could already tell that from the shift of the white caps on the waves midway in the ocean

imron 9y ago

I'm reminded of that quote by Gordon Letwin talking about software bugs and rare events - "in our business one in a million is next Tuesday" This was the next Tuesday of the photography world.

abdulhaq 9y ago

The amazing thing here is not that they took a photo of the same thing at the same time, but that this fact was discovered. With the vast data capture exercise that is the internet, coincidences and patterns can be identified in near real time. Making sense of it all, however, is not so quick :-)

yangyang 9y ago

I had the same thing happen with one of my photos of lightning in London. I actually thought my shot had been ripped off at first glance, then realised it was from a different angle. Mine: https://www.flickr.com/photos/beechlights/2739042419/in/photolist-5b3iTi-5bn2YL-5b7BMC-5b3iCe-83tPjj https://www.flickr.com/photos/beechlights/2739042419/in/phot... Alternative, from the Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/earth/2515652/Summer-lightning-over-southern-England.html?image=7 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/earth/2515...

ger_in_no 9y ago
Looks at first sight like much of a bigger coincidence, but given that you probably both used a long shutter speed (yours seems to have been 6s) and selected the nicest of a number of shots, it's not like there are crazy chances against getting two almost identical shots like this.
- yangyang 9y ago
  Oh yeah, I don't deny it isn't insanely improbable. Still, finding same strike in a newspaper, shot from a very similar angle, was quite surprising.
  - tabio 9y ago
    Nice quadruple-negative.
    - craigds 9y ago
      Surprisingly readable!
- herogreen 9y ago
  Actually that could be much more likely if both used automated triggering.
  - 9y ago

brudgers 9y ago

[I felt like I was playing "Find 8 differences between these pictures" on the comics page] I looked at the large images. Gendon's appears to have been shot slightly earlier based on two differences. 1. The crest of the background wave at the left is horizontal in Gendon's photo and turning down from photo left to right in Risman's. 2. The trough in front of the breaking wave has reached the front of the light house in Gendon's photo exposing a sunlit rock at the lower left of the low circular structure. A rock broke wave is most photogenic at the moment of maximum spray extent. The water is at lowest velocity and the gestalt shape is briefly frozen...then gravity dominates and the moment collapses. The shape of the spray is the second most stable element in the scene. While it is the defining photographic moment, it is not clock correlated down at the millisecond level.

logfromblammo 9y ago
I looked at the two photos as a stereogram--focus through the plane instead of crossing your eyes. If they were identical, there would be no 3d effect. My eyes can't figure out how to resolve the foreground waves, because the photographers were too far apart, but the spray wraps around the lighthouse as you would expect.
- elijahparker 9y ago
  This is a great effect! The resulting image is quite stereoscopic (in an exaggerated way) and you can see the stone structure as clearly in front of the lighthouse as well
- cecilpl2 9y ago
  As a side note, it is possible to train yourself to stereogram your eyes at will (I've done it). This makes "spot the difference" puzzles a triviality. Which is, in itself a triviality, but an entertaining one.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    The carpet in my office frequently fools my eyes into the wrong focus. I have been tempted to use a marker to leave a secret message in it for my successor, but that seems like more work than my actual job.

mrfusion 9y ago

This would make an interesting copyright case.

5555624 9y ago
Except that the two pictures are not exactly the same. Once you start looking for differences, you find small ones. For example, the article points out the two differences in the lighthouse. In the foreground of Gendman's picture is a whitecap that is on the left in Risman's picture.
cooper12 9y ago
I found some discussion of copyright infringement by imitation here: https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=scholarship#page=19 https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&con.... [0] In general it seems to be fine to photograph the same object as an earlier copyrighted work, as long as "original aspects" are not copied such as lighting or placement of the subject. The lighting is different here, though the placement barely differs. There's also not a clear "first" since the photographs were taken almost simultaneously. I think at the end of the day, a judge would chock up any alleged infringement as de minimis. [1] This also brings to mind the image of paparazzi or sports photographers all in a narrow press area rapidly shooting off pictures. I don't think any of them have had trouble selling their photographs to agencies despite being in the same location and capturing the same subject simultaneously. [0]: Kogan, Terry S., "How Photographs Infringe" (2017). Utah Law Faculty Scholarship. 20. https://dc.law.utah.edu/scholarship/20 https://dc.law.utah.edu/scholarship/20 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis#Copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis#Copyright

Sarve6 9y ago

This is one of a rare coincidence.

jordache 9y ago

the same sub second... splash's movement frozen in time is not at the ms level precision.... Also the scenario described here is not that rare.. Once you have two photogs there that day, your chances of getting the same shot is already pertty good. The two photographers were essentially firing off continuous shots when they anticipate a wave hitting... Everyone was focused on the lighthouse...

linkmotif 9y ago

> and ultimately we both selected the same photo from that day to promote. That’s the funnest thing about this story imo. These kinds of photographers shoots hundreds or thousands of photos in half an hour. It’s wild they were both struck by one particular exposure.

rqs 9y ago

I don't know what come to your mind after reading that article, but mine was: Oh man! Canon 5D Mark IV is truly far better than 60D. Shopping cart added.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mcbits 9y ago
That is one hell of an impulse buy. Would you care to hear my sob story and startup idea?

patorjk 9y ago

I had a similar thing happen. While browsing Google Maps I found what looked like a poorly cropped version of one of my photos: My photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/40423570@N07/35437050686/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/40423570@N07/35437050686/ Their photo: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fort+Armistead+Park/@39.2088089,-76.5366746,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipMPspVZ2yDYFzRhYdxSFvjOvJXZdFpSih51WqAC!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMPspVZ2yDYFzRhYdxSFvjOvJXZdFpSih51WqAC%3Dw203-h114-k-no!7i5312!8i2988!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c801efdd1d2c55:0x9329693e99d0e4b0!8m2!3d39.2092808!4d-76.5355479 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fort+Armistead+Park/@39.20... However, upon inspection I realized there were differences. It kind of blew my mind that someone had taken a picture of the same sunrise at the same time, from almost the same spot.

ghaff 9y ago
>It kind of blew my mind that someone had taken a picture of the same sunrise at the same time, from almost the same spot. Depends on the spot. I'm sure that, on any given morning, there are probably shots taken in a place like Zabriskie Point that are effectively indistinguishable. (Of course, once there are moving objects in the frame, photos that look identical become much less likely.)
- patorjk 9y ago
  That's true, though this particular spot isn't very popular. Until recently, I'd never seen someone else take a sunrise shot from this particular point of view (the beginning of summer is when the sun is closest to the bridge, and it only rises close enough for a good sunrise photo for around 2 weeks). And when I took my shot, I actually thought I was alone in the park.
- smsm42 9y ago
  I remember going to the tour in Arizona & Utah (Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Zion Park, etc.) and in every scenic spot there were dozens of people with cameras virtually all the time. And when the sunset came, you had to get the good spots in advance because there were even more people trying to take a good shot. So there probably are hundreds of similar photos of these places out there. Still nothing like seeing it all with your own eyes though :)

me_again 9y ago

http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/102182393150/vemödalen-n-the-fear-that-everything-has http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/102182393150/... is a lovely philosophical rumination on this kind of thing.

jastanton 9y ago

I once plugged my usb cable in on the first try. Goes to show you anything is possible!! Edit: upon further inspection it turns out it was USB-C. Nevermind, all is right with the world :)

LesZedCB 9y ago
i know it's a joke, but the usb logo on the plug is always on top, so you can just orient it 'up' according to the underlying board (up for laptops, and facing left for desktops)
- tambourine_man 9y ago
  Apple cables have their logo and USB, if I recall correctly, and they always get me confused.
- tabio 9y ago
  Ok I'll open up my computer case to see which way the board is mounted.
  - sudojudo 9y ago
    He already told you, left is up. The side of your case that has the motherboard's backplate (where you plug everything in) is the bottom. On the vast majority of towers, the plate is on the right side, meaning left is up. EDIT: right/left when looking at the front of the case.
- mod 9y ago
  Yeah, but then you're just guessing at the orientation of the board, so it's still anyone's guess.
diggan 9y ago
Something I learned a few weeks ago (after many years of using USB) is that usually cables have the USB logo or marking on the "right side" up. So if you don't know which one is the right side up, the one with the logo should win. Might help some other lost souls here :)

danschumann 9y ago

I'm glad this isn't a horror story about one person suing another, thinking they had stolen their shot. Happenstance fun-ness is better!

hi41 9y ago

This made me so happy! I have a glee from ear to ear!

imagetic 9y ago

This happens a lot. You could probably find 20 photographers in my area who capture frames with the same timestamp during a sunset by a lighthouse.

sparkzilla 9y ago

Snap!

politician 9y ago

If two photographers shoot the same millisecond in time, who owns the copyright? In this example, there were discernible differences, but what if the differences were below our level (or care) to discern them?

publicfig 9y ago
No one would likely have copyright over the actual event (or if they did, it would be a separate discussion). Each photographer could have copyright over their image they took.
- politician 9y ago
  Even though their images are identical?

omgPhysics 9y ago

Same millisecond? Prove it... I would buy same 10ms. If two cameras with frame rates of about 8frames/sec were shooting at random, the probability that they are in the same millisecond is very low, like 1.5% or so. If they were in the same 10ms interval... more like 14.5%! Actually not that low, and the apparent difference in the waves might not actually be significant in 10ms (supposing the water was at it's maximum height 10ms^2*9.8m/s2=>less than a mm of movement!). Suppose that within a cm the photographs look the same, then this implies a time interval (at max water height) of 31ms. Over 31ms given the snapshot intervals there is about 38% chance of the photos being of the same 'moment'.

intrasight 9y ago

I see a lot of differences in the waves, so I'm doubting the "exact millisecond" statement. Perhaps within a few tens of milliseconds.

rsp1984 9y ago
I think that difference is due to the different photographer view points. Both observers center on the lighthouse but from different standpoints. Everything in front of or behind the lighthouse will look different, even if they caught the exact same nanosecond.

ronreiter 9y ago

Statistically, this is actually really not that surprising. Both photographers take multiple shots with a short shutter, usually from the same places, and usually trying to pick the same events. So the only coincidence is basically having two photographers be at the same place and time.

conmarap 9y ago

That's very interesting. Try to think of what the probability of that happening is.

wellboy 9y ago

Acshually...this happens thousands of times every day, due to a phenomenon called collisions.

Aloha 9y ago

This would be the perfect occasion to make a stereoscopic image.

juanmirocks 9y ago

With probably hundreds of photographers at pretty crowded/famous spots (say sports, famous buildings, or nature places) and using long shutter speeds, should not these improbable coincidences be not so improbable?

estebank 9y ago
It's a picture of waves crashing at high shutter speeds to be able to sharply capture the scene. having the same picture of a person (slow moving) or a lightning (slow shutter speeds) is much easier.

jaxtellerSoA 9y ago

And Ron is the better photographer. The other photo is a little bit over exposed. This assumes that both photos were not edited.

cphoover 9y ago
Ron already admitted his was edited with adobe lightroom.

sib 9y ago

Things move a lot in a millisecond, although it's certainly easier to see that in small-scale images rather than this lighthouse one. https://sib.smugmug.com/Sports/Baseball/SEA-DET/i-jhrMkC3/A https://sib.smugmug.com/Sports/Baseball/SEA-DET/i-jhrMkC3/A This is a picture that I took in 2009; you can see the ball coming off Ken Griffey's bat after breaking it. A major league fastball comes off the bat at 100+ miles per hour (45 m / s). The shutter speed was 1/640s (about 1.5 msec). The ball is about 7.26 cm in diameter.

ComputerGuru 9y ago
Nice example. To make your point clearer: that motion blur is how much the ball moved in just 1.5ms
- sib 9y ago
  Exactly, thanks for clarifying. And also why I was shooting with single shots to try to time the ball close to the bat. Given a camera that took about 5 frames per second (200msec between frames), the ball would move about 29 feet (8.8m) in between frames. The breaking bat was a nice surprise.

ehosca 9y ago

this is really not all that hard to do ... all you need are 2 photographers equipped with cameras that can to better than 12 frames per second (EOS 1Dx for example) and fire away simultaneously at the same subject ... then go through the bursted images and find the files that match ...