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My understanding of the argument is that institutional racism means all the white people simply didn’t think about photographing dark people. Not so much “omg e

• silisili 5y ago
  I (an outsider), think you're about half right. Most photography until relatively recently was just dumb tech. Decide an exposure and go. It just so happened that it worked out well for lighter skinned people, and less so for others. In that I mean, I don't think the companies were ever purposefully blind to darker skins - just stuck with it and said 'good enough ship it.' It also makes me wonder what if a darker skinned person invented the tech. Would they say it's garbage? Did that give light skinned people an advantage? Interesting thoughts. Even today this is only accomplished on phones by HDR to the point of making every photo look fake. Apparently photography is hard, it must be if we are still here with this problem... which makes me appreciate my own eyeballs even more.
  • Swizec 5y ago
    In the 99pi episode they talk about how Kodak released better film in the 70s/80s that could take good pictures of dark people and marketed it as “Able to photograph the details of a dark horse in low light”. Widely considered a coded phrase for black people.
    • silisili 5y ago
      Marketing speak, no matter how poor taste. I mean, how long have laundry soaps been saying they make whites whiter? At my age, soaps should be making plasma if these advances held any credence. That aside...my wife is a dark skinned person. That I cannot take a normal photo of her without blowing out the background is infuriating. Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob. If I click her face, she looks normal but standing in front of a nuclear blast. Not because I think any company is racist, but because I wonder why we are still stuck with it. If our eyes see people in a way, and have for all of time, why in the age of nanobots and ai and everything else still failing so badly?
      • jacobolus 5y ago
        > cannot take a normal photo of her without blowing out the background If your wife’s skin is significantly darker than the background and your photographic process doesn’t have the dynamic range for both, you can e.g. use fill flash, bounce extra light off a large reflector onto her face, use a filter over the lens (works well for taking B&W images in some situations), or take a picture using a process with better dynamic range (and optionally play with the image when printing, either lightening specific parts or applying some global lightness curve; e.g. you can take 2 pictures with one exposed for the foreground and the other exposed for the background and blend them in software). > Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob. This happens to a substantial extent to people of all skin tones, though the darker the skin the harder it gets. The sunset is much, much brighter than foreground objects. Try fill flash (and if the results are poor, try to figure out how to position your flash somewhere further from the lens, e.g. by using a separate flash).
        • silisili 5y ago
          I much appreciate the advice, it's not lost on me. I guess I'm just confused why we cannot solve this problem today in a normalish way, as our eyes see things. And more confused that we call tech from 50 years ago racist because it could also not achieve it.
          • Swizec 5y ago
            I think our brains use a lot of visual processing to make that work. Similar to how modern phones use AI object detection to identify important parts of low light photos and use different lighting params for different parts. My iphone 13 for example visibly highlights my face in a backlit selfie a few seconds after taking the photo.
          • robbedpeter 5y ago
            It's an example of Moravec's paradox, in which something that seems intuitive, simple, and utterly effortless to us turns out to be massively difficult to do in software. In this case, it's a matter of raw processing power and Moore's law eventually catching up to the dynamic range of human vision, but there are sporadic deep learning attempts to tackle it. https://gizmodo.com/this-amazing-camera-can-capture-both-the-sun-and-the-st-5911315 https://gizmodo.com/this-amazing-camera-can-capture-both-the... The size of sensors is decreasing, and currently you can recreate the performance of that 2012 tech with a sensor about 20% its size but about the same price. The problem with cameras is this: You need more sensors crammed into smaller space (megapixels) with higher resolution of the range of frequencies each sensor captures (dynamic range,) and/or a higher rate of sampling per sensor to improve the quality of images (framerate.) The chips used are already running at maximum speed, so the size of a sensor is constrained by how many pixels can be processed at framerates expected by consumers, usually 30 to 60 fps for video. You can adjust the dynamic range using physical color filters in the lenses, removing all infrared for example. Then the sensors will only trigger on visible light, and you can tweak the sensors to bethere are other tricks used to optimize what's being captured. The issue is sensitivity - the number of photons hitting a sensor required to activate it. Darker colors reflect fewer photons, so lighter colors "overwhelm" the sensors. Even multiple samples can't overcome some of the limitations, among which is certain conditions in which black skin shows up weirdly in video and images (to the perennial frustration of digital photographers, and a frequent topic of complaint amongst pornographers.) https://www.ovt.com/sensors/OV9716 https://www.ovt.com/sensors/OV9716 This latest high end sensor has between 18-20 bits of dynamic range, or 120db resolution. This is getting close to human performance, and if the world doesn't fall apart in the next ten years, there will be human equivalent hdr cameras on phones, and there won't be a camera problem for darker skinned people anymore. In the meantime, if your camera can save photos in .raw format, it's the unprocessed output from the sensor itself. You can process the raw pictures with desktop applications like photoshop to correct the colors, and turn those sunset photos of your wife into memories instead of disappointments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format There's a whole slew of tutorials and applications for correcting issues with skin tones and different lighting conditions. There's a bit of a learning curve, but something most people can accomplish in an afternoon.
    • jollybean 5y ago
      So the evil racist film makers designed a film specifically to help a group look better, but then used sneaky KKK 'coded language' to denigrate them? Or maybe that would make no sense, so there's no basis for your conspiratorial conjecture.
      • Swizec 5y ago
        I’m just quoting the podcast episode we’re all commenting on.
  • jacobolus 5y ago
    > just so happened that it worked out well for lighter skinned people Centuries of collective effort by engineers and chemists went into these photographic technologies. If photographs of wealthy people in Rochester, NY in the first half of the 20th century had looked terrible, they would have kept tweaking the technology until they fixed it.
    • silisili 5y ago
      It's 2021 and still not close to fixed, how do you propose they'd fix film half a century ago or more?
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • dagmx 5y ago
        The problems being discussed are more than just the ability of film at the time to capture things , it's the education around it. Shirley cards and books around that time were built to normalize white skin and blonde hair. It wasn't even considered a problem at the time that black skin wasn't reproduced well until furniture and chocolate manufacturers complained that their products weren't well shot. There's both a technical and a societal element to it. I suggest watching this video , especially from the 25 minute mark https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8 https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8
  • dagmx 5y ago
    I think this is incredibly trivializing of both the tech and art. So getting exposure isn't just an arbitrary value. It's relative to tons of things, so it's always been possible to shoot darker skin. The issue wasn't just exposure though. It's actually quite possible to shoot darker skin in lower light. You just need to know how to light it and capture the skin. (E.g darker tones are more specular on film) The issue was color calibration and education. Film was designed to highlight certain tones, lighting setups were geared towards certain demographics. Those were the demographics that a segregated society preferred to show, and in turn made it so darker skinned demographics weren't equally visually representable. You absolutely do not need HDR photography to shoot darker skin with lighter skin. In fact most cameras have enough dynamic range today to deal without an HDR capture.
    • silisili 5y ago
      > You absolutely do not need HDR photography to shoot darker skin with lighter skin. In fact most cameras have enough dynamic range today to deal without an HDR capture. We may be conflating techs(my fault). I'm mostly interested in digital, so I can't defend much about film. I know of no phone camera that can do what you say. As a diverse family, either I'm blown out, or my wife looks like a chunk of coal. Even her Fuji digicam behaves this way.
      • dagmx 5y ago
        It does require quite a bit of processing, that's true, especially on camera phones. iPhones and Pixels have gotten a lot better at optimizing images for multiple ethnicities, but not everyone has the same processing accumen. On the standalone camera, shoot RAW if you can. If you're shooting jpeg, you're beholden to the cameras signal processing which can still be quite biased to certain tones. It'll require you to process the image yourself, but you'll have access to a lot more range than the jpeg output.
        • DeathArrow 5y ago
          >It does require quite a bit of processing, that's true, especially on camera phones. If you mess with the curves by raising the shadows or lowering the highlights, the image will look strange. If you photograph something with a large difference between lights and darks and want to convey as much information as you can, you have to use some additional lighting, like speedlights, studio lights, reflectors.
• michrassena 5y ago
  I think essentially that's what this boils down to. Color slide film of the time, like Kodachrome, had a narrow range of exposure. I see no reason to believe this was anything but a technical limitation. A slide film with more stops of exposure would have been a huge commercial success. Given that narrow range, you could either expose for lighter or darker skin tones. And this is where institutional racism creeps in. In a group where everyone had similar skin tones, you wouldn't face an issue exposing the film properly. But where there was a variety, it was commonplace to treat exposing for the lighter skin tones as more important. The group with darker skin was treated as if it didn't matter, or mattered far less. I think this is the key idea. Even rejecting the idea that Kodak and other film companies made the choice to exclude a group of people, they created a default, an inertia, which had to worked against to be equitable. My mind keeps coming back to the Pareto principle. In pursuing the 80% of customers might be the wealthier group, the easier to convert, the most likely to use your product, is it often the same %20 who are left out and don't they matter?
  • dagmx 5y ago
    It's not just about exposure though. It was about color reproduction too.
    • michrassena 5y ago
      That's a fair criticism. You could make the case that the film companies didn't care enough to test the film's color reproduction for anything but caucasian skin tones, or didn't put the research dollars into fixing the problem. At the root of that would be racism.
      • dagmx 5y ago
        I like the term this presentation took for situations like this with "anti racist research" https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8 https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8 Like you said, at the root of that is racism, but the presentation frames it in an interesting way. Not everyone who takes part in this research is racist, but they're the products of racism in society. So color not being accurately reproduced could either be a direct product of racist people or the result of people in a society that doesn't value everyone equally. But I like the wording of "anti racist research" because it pushes the onus to actively trying to analyze if things are fair, rather than assuming they are. Even people who aren't actively racist can benefit their research from trying to push past the biases inherent in society that permiates everything