15 ms·

Photography and racial bias

74 points by kwindla 7y ago

ohiovr 7y ago
Or the outrage built into clickbait
- kwindla 7y ago
  Having read the article (and being just enough of an amateur photographer to know how hard it is to take good pictures, and how much harder it was when working in film instead of digital) I don't actually think the headline is over-stating the case at all.
  - ohiovr 7y ago
    Is the camera obscura racist?
    - Coffeewine 7y ago
      From the article: Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions. Light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology, fulfilling the needs of its target dominant market. For example, developing color-film technology initially required what was called a Shirley card. When you sent off your film to get developed, lab technicians would use the image of a white woman with brown hair named Shirley as the measuring stick against which they calibrated the colors. Quality control meant ensuring that Shirley’s face looked good. It has translated into the color-balancing of digital technology. In the mid-1990s, Kodak created a multiracial Shirley Card with three women, one black, one white, and one Asian, and later included a Latina model, in an attempt intended to help camera operators calibrate skin tones. These were not adopted by everyone since they coincided with the rise of digital photography. The result was film emulsion technology that still carried over the social bias of earlier photographic conventions.
      - AmericanChopper 7y ago
        I can see the case she’s making for film photography, but her remarks on digital photography came off as having a bit of a gripe against physics itself. Any darker and lower-contrast object is going to be more difficult to photograph in detail than a lighter higher-contrast object. To imply that the reason technology hasn’t sufficiently (in her opinion) overcome this challenge is due to racial bias is quite a leap. Especially since low light and low contrast photography has such a broad application outside of photographing people, and is met with all the same challenges.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      No, not any more than eyes are. At least, with a neutral projection surface. But once you add technology for recording photographs on film, or creating and displaying digital images, there's potential for racism. I know next to nothing about photography. But it seems pretty clear that building stuff that works well for everyone is a hard problem.
      - ohiovr 7y ago
        I take issue with this article simply because photography isn't a technology at all. It is an art that uses technology. There are millions of pictures of people of all races that look perfectly fine. I take issue with stirring up people for no reason. If a maker of paints in the 1800s owned slaves does that mean that painting (then, now, in the future) is racist? How ridiculous can we get?
        dang 7y ago
        Sure it's ridiculous. But also it's not what the author says. Therefore your comment breaks this site guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and doing a better job of posting substantively here? You've posted one-liner flamebait twice already, which is not cool, especially on a divisive topic.
        ohiovr 7y ago
        I will just avoid these articles. Sorry i hurt the outrage.
        mirimir 7y ago
        If "millions of pictures of people of all races ... look perfectly fine", that just means that those photographers had requisite skills. And cared enough to get it right. But the issue isn't so much about those photographers. It's about the defaults designed into film, cameras, photosensors, and so on. As TFA discusses. So random users -- and even many technicians -- don't get good results when they rely on the defaults. As in "your jacket is lighter than your face". And that's even an issue for many "white" people, which is why TV makeup is such a thing. And about your paint maker. If they didn't care very much about painting dark-skinned people, maybe they wouldn't put much effort into researching and developing paints that worked well for that. It's exactly the same issue as with Kodak in TFA. So is that racism? One could argue that it's just not caring very much about some race(s) of people. But one could also argue that anything that's race-based is racism.
haihaibye 7y ago
The people who invented the tech (US/Europe/Japan) optimised it for consumers around them. If darker skinned people had invented it, or had been a richer consumer group things would have been different - to think otherwise you'd have to think greedy capitalists would give up piles of cash to be racist. Why hate on inventors who create something cool just because it doesn't quite work as well for all groups of people? Surely this also left a gap in the market - someone could have optimized film for darker skin tones and made a lot of money?
- dang 7y ago
  The article covers all of this closely, and I see nothing in it that can fairly be described as "hate on inventors". Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? I think you'll notice that they require HN comments to be more substantive than this one here. For one, there's this: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." The author of an article is someone. Then there's this: "Eschew flamebait." Taking an HN thread further into flamewar, which is the direction your comment points in and alas even moves a little into, definitely breaks that guideline. Keep in mind that once one person goes there, a lot of others are going to go there—for and against, bashing each other along the way—so the biggest responsibility is not to be first to go there. If we all avoid that, no flamewar. There's also: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." It seems to me that the dismissals here were indeed shallow, reminiscent of instant objections that pop into one's mind when encountering what, for whatever reason, we dislike. That mechanism is hardly unique to you—it is active in 100% of us. But the HN guidelines have been carefully written to ask all of us to slow down and inhibit that mechanism—to be more reflective and less reflexive—because this is the only way to get good conversation on the internet. There are two other guidelines that the comment breaks, but I'll leave them as an exercise for the curious.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - 7y ago
dang 7y ago
All: this post was flagged. But it is obviously intellectually interesting and therefore on topic here, regardless of one's views on race and other issues. It's full of fascinating detail, and even has a technical aspect for the less-curious among us who only find technical things interesting. I've turned off the flags and rolled back the timestamp on the post. We can debait the title a bit, but a substantive article with a slightly baity title is not one that should be flagged. If the title is your issue, you're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com, or suggest a better title in the thread, which we'll happily use if we see the suggestion. One last thing: if you're going to comment on a thread like this, can you please top up on the site guidelines first? Especially this one: Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Remember that we're going for good conversation—respectful and two-sided—rather than ideological or political battle. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
  Posts can be intellectually stimulating yet not belong on this site. What's important about a submission to users is a lot more nuanced, and I absolutely see why it was flagged. A slightly baity title on the wrong topic generally causes a derailed comment section since the title primes how you interpret the article(and many uses don't read the article). For example, consider a post about the political analysis of the changing voting habits of Congress. The post is great, it is filled with technical details and an explanation on the application of game theory on voting habits in Congress, yet it is titled "Racism in the American Political System along Party Lines." The title enough is alone to disqualify such a post here IMO as it would in itself cause a dumpster-fire of a comment section, or at least have a much higher likelihood of it.
  - dang 7y ago
    Fair points as well. And sure, the title is by far the strongest influence on a new thread. But there are other ways, as I mentioned, for users to request a title change, and if they're flagging an article based on title alone without looking at the text, that's not good. I appreciate how the moderation call could seem non-obvious in this case, even though it was obvious to me. Here's the most important thing: people shouldn't just flag every divisive article. It depends on the quality of the specific article. We don't want HN to be taken over by political battle. But we also don't want to sanitize it of social issues, because it would be less intellectually interesting that way, and that is the entire point of the site. Here's a good question to ask when deciding whether to flag: what is the information-to-indignation ratio of the article? If it's high, don't flag it. I wrote about this the other day, for anyone who wants more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19720659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19720659. What prompted me to comment publicly in the current case is that the article was high in information and low in indignation—surprisingly low, considering where the author is coming from. Which makes the article even more interesting, btw—any time an article defies expectation for its genre, that's good for HN.
kwindla 7y ago
I posted this, and definitely wasn't thinking of it as clickbait, or even as controversial. As Dan says, I think this history is both intellectually interesting and relevant to my work as an engineer, today. Over time, as the technology of photography was invented and iteratively improved, film formulations came to work better for taking photographs of light-skinned people than of dark-skinned people. Inventors and engineers didn't set out to disadvantage dark-skinned people specifically. But it happened anyway. In the relatively short history of commercial "AI", we've already seen examples of machine learning systems that followed a similar development path. Non-representative data sets[0], replicating existing bias[1], over-fitting data sets to the point where the outcomes violate non-discrimination laws[2], etc. One way to help avoid making these mistakes is to think about how they were made in the past, in other engineering contexts. [0]-https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/the-underlying-bias-of-facial-recognition-systems/476991/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/the-u... [1]-https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17958784/ai-recruiting-tool-bias-amazon-report https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17958784/ai-recruiting-t... [2]-https://www.vox.com/2019/3/21/18275746/facebook-settles-ad-discrimination-lawsuits https://www.vox.com/2019/3/21/18275746/facebook-settles-ad-d...
- danieltillett 7y ago
  It is not just photography, even in real life under low light conditions it can be hard to read the facial expressions of dark skinned people.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    True. So maybe skin darkening would be more practical than CV Dazzle, because it wouldn't be so unusual. Horrible legacy and PR, though. Anyway, I suspect that was an evolutionary advantage. For hunting in forest and savannah, to hide in shadows. The human rootstock was black, I gather. And lighter skin evolved where soft UV was limiting for vitamin D synthesis. But that's solvable with the right technology. Maybe something like getting overall color value, and then tweaking color contrast. If we can do it in astronomy, we can do it with people.
marmada 7y ago
It is unclear to me why there is "inherited bias" in film/photography technology. Inherited bias implies that the biased film practices of the past have spilled over into the present, causing further racial bias in photography. While it's true that photography in the past was racially biased, it is unclear why modern photography is still racially biased. It may just be genuinely harder to photograph dark skin, after all, the article even says that attempts have been made to fix racial bias in photography. All of this being said, even if photography is not racially biased and the issue is more technological rather than social, the problem should still be fixed. I could also be wrong about all of this, and in reality dark skin is just as easy to photograph as light skin, but the article did not give a modern example of the racially biased "Shirley card"--except for facial recognition technology, but I didn't really consider that photography in the traditional sense. Edit: While modern photography may not be racially biased, Kwindla does make an excellent point that machine learning is replicating the past mistakes of photography.
- deytempo 7y ago
  Machine learning merely learns patterns that are fed into it. I find it rather amusing that people do not like the result.
  - ivanbakel 7y ago
    There's no "merely" about it. ML algorithms are decided on historical data, and it's not surprising that historical data has historical bias. There's little "amusing" about a piece of software that re-enforces prejudices, only now in a way that is supported by a technology culture which prides itself on blind faith in machines. For victims of those prejudices, it presents a real and terrifying future.
- zaarn 7y ago
  The issue is probably the dynamic range of the sensor or film. Our eyes are incredibly sensitive to brightness and not very sensitive to color, so as a result, we are kinda good at seeing things with different illumination very well and the brain corrects in the color if it's missing it (in fact, most of your vision is black-and-white being colored in by your brain). Cameras on the other hand have one sensor that is only color and not black and white. And with low brightness, noise becomes a huge problem with the electronics. The modern smartphone sensors is incredibly small and even moderate lighting conditions already require some post processing or special capturing methods like HDR to cook up an acceptable image. The issue is most likely fixable by making HDR a standard feature on all cameras and extending the dynamic ranges even further so that darker skin tones are appropriately captured in all lighting conditions.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 7y ago
Great more outrage culture. > Kodak Gold Max became appealing. This new film was billed as being “able to photograph the details of a dark horse in lowlight If this is true please show me the ad? Magazines from the era are easy to get, many are online already. 1995 was when I think Kodak Gold Max came out, do you really think humans way back then wouldn't get what is being said? It may have been used in personal correspondence, by someone, in an unknown context is the best source I can see. There is a interesting discussion here, but this is not it.
patrickg_zill 7y ago
Take a raking kind of light, and shine it on a beige to brown colored wall, so that the light will be stronger on one side and gradually fade in intensity (that is, less reflected light) across the field of view. Now place a different shade of brown upholstered chair, in front of this wall. Take a photo using the Hasselblad X1D, currently considered to have the most accurate color of mainstream cameras. Now try to print it accurately, even with the best quality paper and a high end inkjet printer. Even master printmakers will struggle with it. Why?
js2 7y ago
Fascinating. For about a decade my father owned a one-hour photo lab back in the eighties. I worked for him. When he purchased the equipment for his lab, he didn’t have a ton of money so the equipment was only semi automated. There were two machines, one to develop the color negative film and another to make prints. I operated the printing machine. This involved sitting at a console and feeding each strip of negatives (typically 36 frames) one image at a time over a lamp which lit the negative from below. I then punched some buttons to make each print. I was assisted by a computer. But the computer was dumb. It looked at the negative and tried to average out the exposure so that the resulting print on average would be grey. 18% grey to be exact. So my job was to look at this inverse negative that was 1” x 1.5”, figure out what the scene actually was, then override the computer’s exposure and color balance to get a correct print. 12 minutes later when the print had developed I’d know if I guessed correctly. On a good day, I’d print about 100 rolls of film, 3600 prints, and maybe I’d have to redo about 36 of those. Now this was in Miami and so I was printing picture of every subject and skin type under the sun. And the funny thing is, I don’t recall ever noticing, particularly, that there were any issues with prints of persons of color. What I do remember distinctly is that my dad and I never agreed on blue/yellow color balance. I thought he made everyone look like Smurfs. I pleaded with him to look at the whites of people’s eyes. Never won that battle. It was his shop. Also, beach scenes. Snow scenes. Cameras and film often (counterintuitively) underexposed those. But this was long ago and maybe I didn’t notice or don’t remember.
- Steve44 7y ago
  > Also, beach scenes. Snow scenes. Cameras and film often (counterintuitively) underexposed those. The snow being under-exposed is the camera is trying to balance out the image to 18% grey [usually]. This means in a scene with mainly bright white snow it will expose to make the scene grey, unless you override it. The camera can't [with current technology as far as I know] know that you are shooting snow. If you're shooting in snow then you probably want to adjust exposure by +2 as a starting point. Photographers used to carry around a physical grey card and would use that to take a light meter reading from. That would give the base standard exposure for the ambient light so the scene should be correctly exposed. [ it's more complex due to dynamic range etc but that covers the basics ]
SpaceInvader 7y ago
Is there any way to read that not being logged in?
- baud147258 7y ago
  Switching to another browser might help; it's what I do when I've reached my free article limits.
philwelch 7y ago
For an illustration of how bad photography used to be, consider this photograph of the 1990-1991 Chicago Bulls: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/20/craig-hodges-michael-jordan-nba-chicago-bulls#img-2 https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/20/craig-hodges-m... You can barely make out Michael Jordan's facial features. Michael Jordan, in a team photograph of the 1990/91 Chicago Bulls. The lesson here is to design technology so it works for everyone, not just people like you. Sometimes it's a matter of literal skin color, sometimes it's a question of physical size and shape or abilities.
- lm28469 7y ago
  That's a bad example, half the pic is white (white guys + white shirts), the other half is black (black guys + black suits and dark background). Even with today's tech it's easy to mess a picture like that. It also looks like it was badly scanned / digitalised., cameras in the 90s were way more capable than that. There is no magic, photography is all about light, darker skin colors reflect less light, thus you need to ramp up the exposure or the sensitivity of the film, which destroys details/highlights. The only racial related thing here would be the photographer chosing to correctly expose one skin color over another. That one is similar to your pic but even with the bad resolution you can tell it's much better : https://usercontent1.hubstatic.com/13875852_f520.jpg https://usercontent1.hubstatic.com/13875852_f520.jpg Idk what type of film was used for that particular pic but some films are made to better render white people's skin tones (kodak portra for example), while other are made for the asian markets, some are better for snowy/sandy landscapes, other for blueish/greenish scenes, &c. On the other hand, black and white film works very well on black people: https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article8111113.ece/ALTERNATES/s810/Cassius-Clay-later-Muhammad-Ali.jpg https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article8111113.ece/ALT...
  - philwelch 7y ago
    I did specifically go looking for a more difficult photo; adjusting exposure can help to capture a single skin tone, so a diverse group of skin tones is going to be harder. MJ’s skin tone in particular is pretty dark, though I remember it looking a shade or two lighter at times; I don’t know if that’s because the photographers and TV cameraman adjusted exposure so we could more clearly see him or just normal suntans (off-seasons back home in NC in the summer vs. winter in Chicago). Scottie Pippen, for example, looks relatively fine in the photo. Although it’s a harder photograph to get right in terms of technical difficulty, it’s also more than a fair chance to the photographer since everyone is more or less sat down in a controlled environment. Maybe the Bulls didn’t have the best equipment or photographers in the world, but it’s not a total amateur operation, either.
neilv 7y ago
The 1995 Multicultural Shirley Card image in the article is beyond my skill, but I was a little confused by it, in a way that might be relevant to the article. I'd expect it to let you calibrate for the black woman's hair detail without blowing out the white dress, but this image on my screen (print? scan?) doesn't seem to have done that. It looks like the black woman's hair is almost lost in this image, yet it looks like the photographer put a hair light on the blonde woman, and not on the black woman. (Lighting: In the reflections in their eyes, it looks like two studio lights. A narrow hair light for the blonde, from camera left, might be a third. Also looks like a backdrop light behind, which might also be doing that small hint of rear lighting on camera right of the black woman's hair, which emphasizes that the rest of the hair isn't lit as well as it could be.) (Outfit exposure: The gray outfit might be Gray Card gray, and you can also compare it to the white outfit. The black dress looks hopeless for exposure, at least in this print/scan.) (Focus: The blonde head looks in a bit softer focus, which might be accidental or glamorous.)
- tropdrop 7y ago
  Thank you for sharing - not being familiar with calibration cards, I only paid attention to the features of faces (which seem well-rendered on the print), though the white dresses seemed to unnaturally lack shadow. I did not notice how the black hair texture on the women to the left and right was completely lost until you pointed it out.
  - neilv 7y ago
    With studio lighting (often powerful strobes, though this time it might just be continuous hot lights), it's pretty easy for something white to get blown out completely. If you also have something dark in the scene, you might need more light on that, at the same time that you're trying not to get too much light off the white. One tool in the studio is to use multiple light sources and modifiers. I don't know why that didn't seem to happen for the black woman's hair in this particular print. (The exposure of the white dress might be exactly as they intended, however -- almost an extreme, but the folds still detectable.)
dusted 7y ago
This is interesting, I've always thought that makers of image capture equipment were striving to create technology to capture the world, as it is, without any bias towards any particular subject. Maybe, in a way they were, and they simply went for the lowest hanging fruit first? or maybe they simply put most effort where they believed that there would be most gain for least effort. The reason why they started at one point is not really important, the important thing is that they continue to strive to improve. Not because some group of people are excluded, but because, from a technical standpoint, they're not done before they can capture and display an accurate, neutral, non-biased, factual representation of reality. Same goes for audio, I'm sure getting voice right had priority over music, and that some styles of music had priority over others, but, we're not done before all SOUND, not just music, can be captured and represented accurately.
- lm28469 7y ago
  > I've always thought that makers of image capture equipment were striving to create technology to capture the world, as it is, without any bias towards any particular subject. You'd be surprised, especially with pre-digital photo. Each film emulsion has its own characteristics. I won't go to much into details because it's explained all over the internet already, but here is a quick comparison of a few emulsions: https://www.thephoblographer.com/2017/11/27/quick-comparison-todays-favorite-iso-400-color-films/ https://www.thephoblographer.com/2017/11/27/quick-comparison...
dandare 7y ago
As fun of darker skin adult models, I always found it annoying how most adult videos mishandle dark skin. I always thought there must be something inherent in the technology that makes it not optimized for darker skins, especially in the hands of less skilled cameramen. I hope no one will be offended by my comment, I mean it factually.
tg2fbfu 7y ago
> suggest a better title in the thread Will do! How about: > Dark Things Are Dark. Film At Eleven! Steve Sailer suggested: > Let's Talk About My Face
jdietrich 7y ago
Dark-skinned faces are inherently more difficult to photograph. Dark skin is in the lowest range of values in most images, but the specular highlights of that skin can reach the highest range of values. Underexpose and you lose all shading; overexpose and you lose the geometric definition given by specular highlights. Pale skin can be made easier to photograph in challenging lighting conditions by using a matte powder, which diffuses specular highlights and reduces the value range. This doesn't work well on dark skin, because subtle shadows are less visible and you lose the impression of shape; you need the specular highlights, but they greatly increase the value range. The problem with early colour films wasn't really hue (all human skin falls into a remarkably narrow range of hues), but a lack of sensitivity and dynamic range compared to monochrome films. They coped with over-exposure reasonably well, but even slight under-exposure would obliterate the detail on dark skin. This limitation of chemistry was a constant problem in all forms of colour photography, but the social burden fell disproportionately on dark-skinned portraiture subjects. Later emulsions had far better rendition of lowlights and smooth compression of highlights, which vastly improved their performance with dark skin.
- aeturnum 7y ago
  I just want to note that the technical causes you list here are, arguably, totally beside the point. All technical systems have strengths and weaknesses. When systems are conceived and developed their goals are set through a culturally-created understanding of what the system "should" do. The lack of attention to darker faces (from chemical process selection to selection of people depicted in kodak's system calibration cards) explains how we got this particular set of technical limitations instead of one that, say, tended to over-expose easily. > Dark-skinned faces are inherently more difficult to photograph I would say that dark-skinned faces are inherently poorly captured by the photographic technology we have developed, which has focused on detail rather than dynamic range.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    >selection of people depicted in kodak's system calibration cards The choice of the model does reflect some amount of bias, but it doesn't cause bias in the printing process. Precise calibration was done with a test chart and a densitometer. Shirley was just a quick reference used throughout the day, to check at a glance whether prints were unnaturally blue or purple or washed out due to changes in the developer chemistry. Fuji usually supplied test films and prints with Asian models, even in European markets; the motion picture industry originally used porcelain dolls. A multi-ethnic test image wouldn't have provided better accuracy. >I would say that dark-skinned faces are inherently poorly captured by the photographic technology we have developed, which has focused on detail rather than dynamic range. Except that the opposite was true for the entire duration of the film era. The photographic film industry was acutely aware of the fact that most consumer photographs were taken on compact cameras with mediocre lenses and usually printed at 6"x4". They were also aware that the main complaints from consumers and darkroom technicians were about exposure latitude and colour accuracy. Their development efforts and marketing materials reflected this awareness. Most consumers had never even heard the word "resolution" until the megapixel wars. Ektar, the only Kodak colour negative film specifically marketed as being especially fine-grained and high-resolution, failed commercially and was discontinued after five years.
deleted 7y ago
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Chris2048 7y ago
Can someone explain the following, The author says: instead of seeking a solution, the technician had decided that my body was somehow unsuitable for the stage" But the technician said: "We have a problem. Your jacket is lighter than your face, That’s going to be a problem for lighting" In what sense did the technician decide the author should be removed from the stage, and seek no other solution?
- patrickg_zill 7y ago
  You can do an image search on your favorite search engine and look for someone like Donna Brazile, who has been in politics for a long time and understands appearing on TV. Then you can look at the clothes she is wearing and realize that in every photo where she is wearing a lighter dress or jacket, the automatic exposure settings of the camera adjusted for the average lighting of the scene and underexposed her face. That is why, because Brazile has done countless TV appearances for decades ... in most of the photos you can see that she wears darker jackets or clothing.

74 points by kwindla 7y ago

ohiovr 7y ago

Or the outrage built into clickbait

kwindla 7y ago
Having read the article (and being just enough of an amateur photographer to know how hard it is to take good pictures, and how much harder it was when working in film instead of digital) I don't actually think the headline is over-stating the case at all.
- ohiovr 7y ago
  Is the camera obscura racist?
  - Coffeewine 7y ago
    From the article: Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions. Light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology, fulfilling the needs of its target dominant market. For example, developing color-film technology initially required what was called a Shirley card. When you sent off your film to get developed, lab technicians would use the image of a white woman with brown hair named Shirley as the measuring stick against which they calibrated the colors. Quality control meant ensuring that Shirley’s face looked good. It has translated into the color-balancing of digital technology. In the mid-1990s, Kodak created a multiracial Shirley Card with three women, one black, one white, and one Asian, and later included a Latina model, in an attempt intended to help camera operators calibrate skin tones. These were not adopted by everyone since they coincided with the rise of digital photography. The result was film emulsion technology that still carried over the social bias of earlier photographic conventions.
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      I can see the case she’s making for film photography, but her remarks on digital photography came off as having a bit of a gripe against physics itself. Any darker and lower-contrast object is going to be more difficult to photograph in detail than a lighter higher-contrast object. To imply that the reason technology hasn’t sufficiently (in her opinion) overcome this challenge is due to racial bias is quite a leap. Especially since low light and low contrast photography has such a broad application outside of photographing people, and is met with all the same challenges.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    No, not any more than eyes are. At least, with a neutral projection surface. But once you add technology for recording photographs on film, or creating and displaying digital images, there's potential for racism. I know next to nothing about photography. But it seems pretty clear that building stuff that works well for everyone is a hard problem.
    - ohiovr 7y ago
      I take issue with this article simply because photography isn't a technology at all. It is an art that uses technology. There are millions of pictures of people of all races that look perfectly fine. I take issue with stirring up people for no reason. If a maker of paints in the 1800s owned slaves does that mean that painting (then, now, in the future) is racist? How ridiculous can we get?
      - dang 7y ago
        Sure it's ridiculous. But also it's not what the author says. Therefore your comment breaks this site guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and doing a better job of posting substantively here? You've posted one-liner flamebait twice already, which is not cool, especially on a divisive topic.
        ohiovr 7y ago
        I will just avoid these articles. Sorry i hurt the outrage.
      - mirimir 7y ago
        If "millions of pictures of people of all races ... look perfectly fine", that just means that those photographers had requisite skills. And cared enough to get it right. But the issue isn't so much about those photographers. It's about the defaults designed into film, cameras, photosensors, and so on. As TFA discusses. So random users -- and even many technicians -- don't get good results when they rely on the defaults. As in "your jacket is lighter than your face". And that's even an issue for many "white" people, which is why TV makeup is such a thing. And about your paint maker. If they didn't care very much about painting dark-skinned people, maybe they wouldn't put much effort into researching and developing paints that worked well for that. It's exactly the same issue as with Kodak in TFA. So is that racism? One could argue that it's just not caring very much about some race(s) of people. But one could also argue that anything that's race-based is racism.

haihaibye 7y ago

The people who invented the tech (US/Europe/Japan) optimised it for consumers around them. If darker skinned people had invented it, or had been a richer consumer group things would have been different - to think otherwise you'd have to think greedy capitalists would give up piles of cash to be racist. Why hate on inventors who create something cool just because it doesn't quite work as well for all groups of people? Surely this also left a gap in the market - someone could have optimized film for darker skin tones and made a lot of money?

dang 7y ago
The article covers all of this closely, and I see nothing in it that can fairly be described as "hate on inventors". Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? I think you'll notice that they require HN comments to be more substantive than this one here. For one, there's this: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." The author of an article is someone. Then there's this: "Eschew flamebait." Taking an HN thread further into flamewar, which is the direction your comment points in and alas even moves a little into, definitely breaks that guideline. Keep in mind that once one person goes there, a lot of others are going to go there—for and against, bashing each other along the way—so the biggest responsibility is not to be first to go there. If we all avoid that, no flamewar. There's also: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." It seems to me that the dismissals here were indeed shallow, reminiscent of instant objections that pop into one's mind when encountering what, for whatever reason, we dislike. That mechanism is hardly unique to you—it is active in 100% of us. But the HN guidelines have been carefully written to ask all of us to slow down and inhibit that mechanism—to be more reflective and less reflexive—because this is the only way to get good conversation on the internet. There are two other guidelines that the comment breaks, but I'll leave them as an exercise for the curious.
- deleted 7y ago
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dang 7y ago

All: this post was flagged. But it is obviously intellectually interesting and therefore on topic here, regardless of one's views on race and other issues. It's full of fascinating detail, and even has a technical aspect for the less-curious among us who only find technical things interesting. I've turned off the flags and rolled back the timestamp on the post. We can debait the title a bit, but a substantive article with a slightly baity title is not one that should be flagged. If the title is your issue, you're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com, or suggest a better title in the thread, which we'll happily use if we see the suggestion. One last thing: if you're going to comment on a thread like this, can you please top up on the site guidelines first? Especially this one: Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Remember that we're going for good conversation—respectful and two-sided—rather than ideological or political battle. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
Posts can be intellectually stimulating yet not belong on this site. What's important about a submission to users is a lot more nuanced, and I absolutely see why it was flagged. A slightly baity title on the wrong topic generally causes a derailed comment section since the title primes how you interpret the article(and many uses don't read the article). For example, consider a post about the political analysis of the changing voting habits of Congress. The post is great, it is filled with technical details and an explanation on the application of game theory on voting habits in Congress, yet it is titled "Racism in the American Political System along Party Lines." The title enough is alone to disqualify such a post here IMO as it would in itself cause a dumpster-fire of a comment section, or at least have a much higher likelihood of it.
- dang 7y ago
  Fair points as well. And sure, the title is by far the strongest influence on a new thread. But there are other ways, as I mentioned, for users to request a title change, and if they're flagging an article based on title alone without looking at the text, that's not good. I appreciate how the moderation call could seem non-obvious in this case, even though it was obvious to me. Here's the most important thing: people shouldn't just flag every divisive article. It depends on the quality of the specific article. We don't want HN to be taken over by political battle. But we also don't want to sanitize it of social issues, because it would be less intellectually interesting that way, and that is the entire point of the site. Here's a good question to ask when deciding whether to flag: what is the information-to-indignation ratio of the article? If it's high, don't flag it. I wrote about this the other day, for anyone who wants more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19720659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19720659. What prompted me to comment publicly in the current case is that the article was high in information and low in indignation—surprisingly low, considering where the author is coming from. Which makes the article even more interesting, btw—any time an article defies expectation for its genre, that's good for HN.

kwindla 7y ago

I posted this, and definitely wasn't thinking of it as clickbait, or even as controversial. As Dan says, I think this history is both intellectually interesting and relevant to my work as an engineer, today. Over time, as the technology of photography was invented and iteratively improved, film formulations came to work better for taking photographs of light-skinned people than of dark-skinned people. Inventors and engineers didn't set out to disadvantage dark-skinned people specifically. But it happened anyway. In the relatively short history of commercial "AI", we've already seen examples of machine learning systems that followed a similar development path. Non-representative data sets[0], replicating existing bias[1], over-fitting data sets to the point where the outcomes violate non-discrimination laws[2], etc. One way to help avoid making these mistakes is to think about how they were made in the past, in other engineering contexts. [0]-https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/the-underlying-bias-of-facial-recognition-systems/476991/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/the-u... [1]-https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17958784/ai-recruiting-tool-bias-amazon-report https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17958784/ai-recruiting-t... [2]-https://www.vox.com/2019/3/21/18275746/facebook-settles-ad-discrimination-lawsuits https://www.vox.com/2019/3/21/18275746/facebook-settles-ad-d...

danieltillett 7y ago
It is not just photography, even in real life under low light conditions it can be hard to read the facial expressions of dark skinned people.
- mirimir 7y ago
  True. So maybe skin darkening would be more practical than CV Dazzle, because it wouldn't be so unusual. Horrible legacy and PR, though. Anyway, I suspect that was an evolutionary advantage. For hunting in forest and savannah, to hide in shadows. The human rootstock was black, I gather. And lighter skin evolved where soft UV was limiting for vitamin D synthesis. But that's solvable with the right technology. Maybe something like getting overall color value, and then tweaking color contrast. If we can do it in astronomy, we can do it with people.

marmada 7y ago

It is unclear to me why there is "inherited bias" in film/photography technology. Inherited bias implies that the biased film practices of the past have spilled over into the present, causing further racial bias in photography. While it's true that photography in the past was racially biased, it is unclear why modern photography is still racially biased. It may just be genuinely harder to photograph dark skin, after all, the article even says that attempts have been made to fix racial bias in photography. All of this being said, even if photography is not racially biased and the issue is more technological rather than social, the problem should still be fixed. I could also be wrong about all of this, and in reality dark skin is just as easy to photograph as light skin, but the article did not give a modern example of the racially biased "Shirley card"--except for facial recognition technology, but I didn't really consider that photography in the traditional sense. Edit: While modern photography may not be racially biased, Kwindla does make an excellent point that machine learning is replicating the past mistakes of photography.

deytempo 7y ago
Machine learning merely learns patterns that are fed into it. I find it rather amusing that people do not like the result.
- ivanbakel 7y ago
  There's no "merely" about it. ML algorithms are decided on historical data, and it's not surprising that historical data has historical bias. There's little "amusing" about a piece of software that re-enforces prejudices, only now in a way that is supported by a technology culture which prides itself on blind faith in machines. For victims of those prejudices, it presents a real and terrifying future.
zaarn 7y ago
The issue is probably the dynamic range of the sensor or film. Our eyes are incredibly sensitive to brightness and not very sensitive to color, so as a result, we are kinda good at seeing things with different illumination very well and the brain corrects in the color if it's missing it (in fact, most of your vision is black-and-white being colored in by your brain). Cameras on the other hand have one sensor that is only color and not black and white. And with low brightness, noise becomes a huge problem with the electronics. The modern smartphone sensors is incredibly small and even moderate lighting conditions already require some post processing or special capturing methods like HDR to cook up an acceptable image. The issue is most likely fixable by making HDR a standard feature on all cameras and extending the dynamic ranges even further so that darker skin tones are appropriately captured in all lighting conditions.

deleted 7y ago

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aaron695 7y ago

Great more outrage culture. > Kodak Gold Max became appealing. This new film was billed as being “able to photograph the details of a dark horse in lowlight If this is true please show me the ad? Magazines from the era are easy to get, many are online already. 1995 was when I think Kodak Gold Max came out, do you really think humans way back then wouldn't get what is being said? It may have been used in personal correspondence, by someone, in an unknown context is the best source I can see. There is a interesting discussion here, but this is not it.

patrickg_zill 7y ago

Take a raking kind of light, and shine it on a beige to brown colored wall, so that the light will be stronger on one side and gradually fade in intensity (that is, less reflected light) across the field of view. Now place a different shade of brown upholstered chair, in front of this wall. Take a photo using the Hasselblad X1D, currently considered to have the most accurate color of mainstream cameras. Now try to print it accurately, even with the best quality paper and a high end inkjet printer. Even master printmakers will struggle with it. Why?

js2 7y ago

Fascinating. For about a decade my father owned a one-hour photo lab back in the eighties. I worked for him. When he purchased the equipment for his lab, he didn’t have a ton of money so the equipment was only semi automated. There were two machines, one to develop the color negative film and another to make prints. I operated the printing machine. This involved sitting at a console and feeding each strip of negatives (typically 36 frames) one image at a time over a lamp which lit the negative from below. I then punched some buttons to make each print. I was assisted by a computer. But the computer was dumb. It looked at the negative and tried to average out the exposure so that the resulting print on average would be grey. 18% grey to be exact. So my job was to look at this inverse negative that was 1” x 1.5”, figure out what the scene actually was, then override the computer’s exposure and color balance to get a correct print. 12 minutes later when the print had developed I’d know if I guessed correctly. On a good day, I’d print about 100 rolls of film, 3600 prints, and maybe I’d have to redo about 36 of those. Now this was in Miami and so I was printing picture of every subject and skin type under the sun. And the funny thing is, I don’t recall ever noticing, particularly, that there were any issues with prints of persons of color. What I do remember distinctly is that my dad and I never agreed on blue/yellow color balance. I thought he made everyone look like Smurfs. I pleaded with him to look at the whites of people’s eyes. Never won that battle. It was his shop. Also, beach scenes. Snow scenes. Cameras and film often (counterintuitively) underexposed those. But this was long ago and maybe I didn’t notice or don’t remember.

Steve44 7y ago
> Also, beach scenes. Snow scenes. Cameras and film often (counterintuitively) underexposed those. The snow being under-exposed is the camera is trying to balance out the image to 18% grey [usually]. This means in a scene with mainly bright white snow it will expose to make the scene grey, unless you override it. The camera can't [with current technology as far as I know] know that you are shooting snow. If you're shooting in snow then you probably want to adjust exposure by +2 as a starting point. Photographers used to carry around a physical grey card and would use that to take a light meter reading from. That would give the base standard exposure for the ambient light so the scene should be correctly exposed. [ it's more complex due to dynamic range etc but that covers the basics ]

SpaceInvader 7y ago

Is there any way to read that not being logged in?

baud147258 7y ago
Switching to another browser might help; it's what I do when I've reached my free article limits.

philwelch 7y ago

For an illustration of how bad photography used to be, consider this photograph of the 1990-1991 Chicago Bulls: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/20/craig-hodges-michael-jordan-nba-chicago-bulls#img-2 https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/20/craig-hodges-m... You can barely make out Michael Jordan's facial features. Michael Jordan, in a team photograph of the 1990/91 Chicago Bulls. The lesson here is to design technology so it works for everyone, not just people like you. Sometimes it's a matter of literal skin color, sometimes it's a question of physical size and shape or abilities.

lm28469 7y ago
That's a bad example, half the pic is white (white guys + white shirts), the other half is black (black guys + black suits and dark background). Even with today's tech it's easy to mess a picture like that. It also looks like it was badly scanned / digitalised., cameras in the 90s were way more capable than that. There is no magic, photography is all about light, darker skin colors reflect less light, thus you need to ramp up the exposure or the sensitivity of the film, which destroys details/highlights. The only racial related thing here would be the photographer chosing to correctly expose one skin color over another. That one is similar to your pic but even with the bad resolution you can tell it's much better : https://usercontent1.hubstatic.com/13875852_f520.jpg https://usercontent1.hubstatic.com/13875852_f520.jpg Idk what type of film was used for that particular pic but some films are made to better render white people's skin tones (kodak portra for example), while other are made for the asian markets, some are better for snowy/sandy landscapes, other for blueish/greenish scenes, &c. On the other hand, black and white film works very well on black people: https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article8111113.ece/ALTERNATES/s810/Cassius-Clay-later-Muhammad-Ali.jpg https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article8111113.ece/ALT...
- philwelch 7y ago
  I did specifically go looking for a more difficult photo; adjusting exposure can help to capture a single skin tone, so a diverse group of skin tones is going to be harder. MJ’s skin tone in particular is pretty dark, though I remember it looking a shade or two lighter at times; I don’t know if that’s because the photographers and TV cameraman adjusted exposure so we could more clearly see him or just normal suntans (off-seasons back home in NC in the summer vs. winter in Chicago). Scottie Pippen, for example, looks relatively fine in the photo. Although it’s a harder photograph to get right in terms of technical difficulty, it’s also more than a fair chance to the photographer since everyone is more or less sat down in a controlled environment. Maybe the Bulls didn’t have the best equipment or photographers in the world, but it’s not a total amateur operation, either.

neilv 7y ago

The 1995 Multicultural Shirley Card image in the article is beyond my skill, but I was a little confused by it, in a way that might be relevant to the article. I'd expect it to let you calibrate for the black woman's hair detail without blowing out the white dress, but this image on my screen (print? scan?) doesn't seem to have done that. It looks like the black woman's hair is almost lost in this image, yet it looks like the photographer put a hair light on the blonde woman, and not on the black woman. (Lighting: In the reflections in their eyes, it looks like two studio lights. A narrow hair light for the blonde, from camera left, might be a third. Also looks like a backdrop light behind, which might also be doing that small hint of rear lighting on camera right of the black woman's hair, which emphasizes that the rest of the hair isn't lit as well as it could be.) (Outfit exposure: The gray outfit might be Gray Card gray, and you can also compare it to the white outfit. The black dress looks hopeless for exposure, at least in this print/scan.) (Focus: The blonde head looks in a bit softer focus, which might be accidental or glamorous.)

tropdrop 7y ago
Thank you for sharing - not being familiar with calibration cards, I only paid attention to the features of faces (which seem well-rendered on the print), though the white dresses seemed to unnaturally lack shadow. I did not notice how the black hair texture on the women to the left and right was completely lost until you pointed it out.
- neilv 7y ago
  With studio lighting (often powerful strobes, though this time it might just be continuous hot lights), it's pretty easy for something white to get blown out completely. If you also have something dark in the scene, you might need more light on that, at the same time that you're trying not to get too much light off the white. One tool in the studio is to use multiple light sources and modifiers. I don't know why that didn't seem to happen for the black woman's hair in this particular print. (The exposure of the white dress might be exactly as they intended, however -- almost an extreme, but the folds still detectable.)

dusted 7y ago

This is interesting, I've always thought that makers of image capture equipment were striving to create technology to capture the world, as it is, without any bias towards any particular subject. Maybe, in a way they were, and they simply went for the lowest hanging fruit first? or maybe they simply put most effort where they believed that there would be most gain for least effort. The reason why they started at one point is not really important, the important thing is that they continue to strive to improve. Not because some group of people are excluded, but because, from a technical standpoint, they're not done before they can capture and display an accurate, neutral, non-biased, factual representation of reality. Same goes for audio, I'm sure getting voice right had priority over music, and that some styles of music had priority over others, but, we're not done before all SOUND, not just music, can be captured and represented accurately.

lm28469 7y ago
> I've always thought that makers of image capture equipment were striving to create technology to capture the world, as it is, without any bias towards any particular subject. You'd be surprised, especially with pre-digital photo. Each film emulsion has its own characteristics. I won't go to much into details because it's explained all over the internet already, but here is a quick comparison of a few emulsions: https://www.thephoblographer.com/2017/11/27/quick-comparison-todays-favorite-iso-400-color-films/ https://www.thephoblographer.com/2017/11/27/quick-comparison...

dandare 7y ago

As fun of darker skin adult models, I always found it annoying how most adult videos mishandle dark skin. I always thought there must be something inherent in the technology that makes it not optimized for darker skins, especially in the hands of less skilled cameramen. I hope no one will be offended by my comment, I mean it factually.

tg2fbfu 7y ago

> suggest a better title in the thread Will do! How about: > Dark Things Are Dark. Film At Eleven! Steve Sailer suggested: > Let's Talk About My Face

jdietrich 7y ago

Dark-skinned faces are inherently more difficult to photograph. Dark skin is in the lowest range of values in most images, but the specular highlights of that skin can reach the highest range of values. Underexpose and you lose all shading; overexpose and you lose the geometric definition given by specular highlights. Pale skin can be made easier to photograph in challenging lighting conditions by using a matte powder, which diffuses specular highlights and reduces the value range. This doesn't work well on dark skin, because subtle shadows are less visible and you lose the impression of shape; you need the specular highlights, but they greatly increase the value range. The problem with early colour films wasn't really hue (all human skin falls into a remarkably narrow range of hues), but a lack of sensitivity and dynamic range compared to monochrome films. They coped with over-exposure reasonably well, but even slight under-exposure would obliterate the detail on dark skin. This limitation of chemistry was a constant problem in all forms of colour photography, but the social burden fell disproportionately on dark-skinned portraiture subjects. Later emulsions had far better rendition of lowlights and smooth compression of highlights, which vastly improved their performance with dark skin.

aeturnum 7y ago
I just want to note that the technical causes you list here are, arguably, totally beside the point. All technical systems have strengths and weaknesses. When systems are conceived and developed their goals are set through a culturally-created understanding of what the system "should" do. The lack of attention to darker faces (from chemical process selection to selection of people depicted in kodak's system calibration cards) explains how we got this particular set of technical limitations instead of one that, say, tended to over-expose easily. > Dark-skinned faces are inherently more difficult to photograph I would say that dark-skinned faces are inherently poorly captured by the photographic technology we have developed, which has focused on detail rather than dynamic range.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  >selection of people depicted in kodak's system calibration cards The choice of the model does reflect some amount of bias, but it doesn't cause bias in the printing process. Precise calibration was done with a test chart and a densitometer. Shirley was just a quick reference used throughout the day, to check at a glance whether prints were unnaturally blue or purple or washed out due to changes in the developer chemistry. Fuji usually supplied test films and prints with Asian models, even in European markets; the motion picture industry originally used porcelain dolls. A multi-ethnic test image wouldn't have provided better accuracy. >I would say that dark-skinned faces are inherently poorly captured by the photographic technology we have developed, which has focused on detail rather than dynamic range. Except that the opposite was true for the entire duration of the film era. The photographic film industry was acutely aware of the fact that most consumer photographs were taken on compact cameras with mediocre lenses and usually printed at 6"x4". They were also aware that the main complaints from consumers and darkroom technicians were about exposure latitude and colour accuracy. Their development efforts and marketing materials reflected this awareness. Most consumers had never even heard the word "resolution" until the megapixel wars. Ektar, the only Kodak colour negative film specifically marketed as being especially fine-grained and high-resolution, failed commercially and was discontinued after five years.

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Chris2048 7y ago

Can someone explain the following, The author says: instead of seeking a solution, the technician had decided that my body was somehow unsuitable for the stage" But the technician said: "We have a problem. Your jacket is lighter than your face, That’s going to be a problem for lighting" In what sense did the technician decide the author should be removed from the stage, and seek no other solution?

patrickg_zill 7y ago
You can do an image search on your favorite search engine and look for someone like Donna Brazile, who has been in politics for a long time and understands appearing on TV. Then you can look at the clothes she is wearing and realize that in every photo where she is wearing a lighter dress or jacket, the automatic exposure settings of the camera adjusted for the average lighting of the scene and underexposed her face. That is why, because Brazile has done countless TV appearances for decades ... in most of the photos you can see that she wears darker jackets or clothing.