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> 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 pr

> 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.
- lizknope 5y ago
  Your body's visual processing system (eyes and brain) are the result of millions (maybe billions) of years of evolution. Photography and digital sensors are less than 200 years old. The film technology 50 years ago was not racist. The people who designed that film technology didn't care enough to put the effort into developing film technology that could discern multiple shades of darker skin tones. It is not direct racism like actively trying to take away a black person's right to vote. It is indirect racism of not caring enough about black people to try to make film record their skin tones better. Once the furniture and chocolate industry showed up with the money to have brown tones recorded better on film suddenly Kodak was interested.
  - Aloha 5y ago
    It's not even that they didn't care. It likely never crossed their minds because of how segregated America and specifically Rochester was at that time.

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.
lizknope 5y ago
Your body's visual processing system (eyes and brain) are the result of millions (maybe billions) of years of evolution. Photography and digital sensors are less than 200 years old. The film technology 50 years ago was not racist. The people who designed that film technology didn't care enough to put the effort into developing film technology that could discern multiple shades of darker skin tones. It is not direct racism like actively trying to take away a black person's right to vote. It is indirect racism of not caring enough about black people to try to make film record their skin tones better. Once the furniture and chocolate industry showed up with the money to have brown tones recorded better on film suddenly Kodak was interested.
- Aloha 5y ago
  It's not even that they didn't care. It likely never crossed their minds because of how segregated America and specifically Rochester was at that time.