5 ms·

Old analog pictures have a really nice quality to them. Colours are rich and vibrant without looking too fake. They are often taken on 35 mm film, which means a

by enaaem 5y ago

Old analog pictures have a really nice quality to them. Colours are rich and vibrant without looking too fake. They are often taken on 35 mm film, which means a natural shallow dept off field. I really enjoy browsing through the box of old pictures from my youth. Everyone above 30 probably has their youth snapped on film, while most pics nowadays are shot on phones. I wonder how someone 40 years in the future would look back at 2021 iPhone pictures of themselves?

ImprovedSilence 5y ago
Ive actually just started to take the time, once a year, to go through all my phone photos, and print out a couple hundred of them and put them in a photo album. I suspect they’ll still be around when me and my iCloud account are long gone, for the grandkids to discover in their parents basement.
m_st 5y ago
They'll be overwhelmed because there are so many photos and movies. I honestly already struggle to share them all with my kids aged 13 and younger.
teekert 5y ago
"I wonder how someone 40 years in the future would look back at 2021 iPhone pictures of themselves? " I make so many pics and videos that I really hope it will be something like this: "Hey locally run AI that guards my data and privacy, please show me about 100 pictures and videos of holidays when the kids were in the age of 5-10, project them on the wall.", "Yes, that one in the mountains is nice, where is that? Can you show me some more of that holiday?", "How about some videos taken around that era in and around the house?" "Did we have a dog back then?" "Ah yes, there is Bello, what a nice dog that was, when did he die?" [Star Trek computer voice: "last picture of Bello was may 5 2014".] No way I'm ever going to sort this mess manually. TBH, a simple import in Shotwell already works wonders, and I absolutely love the "For You" section in "Photos" on my iPhone, I can get lost in there for a long time, but that's just a bit too much tied to Apple for my taste though, I'll be archiving all those files at some point (to 2 local hdds and then rsync them off-site (aka "my parent's house")). Edit: Maybe, at some point, you can construct an interactive narrative about your life like done in The Orville in "Lasting Impressions" [0]. Why are you all so negative about the future people, you need more Star Trek (or The Orville) in your life ;) Nobody is going to get overwhelmed, we're creating a rich source of information about ourselves and the time we live in, which we will probably never really consume as a series of Photographs, that sounds pretty boring indeed, we can do better, show some creativity! [0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7826096/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7826096/
- ekianjo 5y ago
  AI can't even be bothered to do half-reliable text translations, seriously doubt that 40 years from now it will work half as well as we imagine it to be. After all, we all imagined back in in the 80s that we would have flying cars and robots around us by 2020's - we should learn that we are constantly bad predictors and completely off the mark.
  - teekert 5y ago
    No way. The Photos section of the iPhone Photos app is already almost there. It makes the nicest videos from live photos (.heic), with music and it chooses the nice moments by itself. Maybe this not-super-critical-and-necessarily-100%-specific-part is where AI already shines. The "For You" content has complicated titles like "$kid'sName spring 2020" or "A day in the park, summer 2021" or "Happiness". 40 years is a lot.
  - huntertwo 5y ago
    While I agree that the expectations for AI are too high, I think the use case described is almost achievable with today's tech. It's just language processing to process the request (User wants to see dog around this time period in this location) and finding relevant images (find pictures with dog with exif data that matches time period and location).
    - gwern 5y ago
      You could do most of that with some creative use of CLIP. 'Show more of the mountain' is trivial out of the box, and the 'kids aged 5-10' just needs a bit of logic: take a few photos of each kid at various ages 5-10 (perhaps already specified by the user?), embed, average along with the text prompt 'kids aged 5-10', and use those as the targets. 'Around that time' and 'in and around that house' can be done by metadata dates + GPS + image embedding of the 'house' (or just the text embedding of the word 'house'!) to filter photos by date+location, and then similarity to 'house'. And so on. The question there is how to be able to create those queries automatically in response to transcribed user voice commands. But hey, given Codex/Copilot, who can doubt that programming such queries is out of reach of a contemporary NN either?
pilsetnieks 5y ago
> They are often taken on 35 mm film, which means a natural shallow dept off field Not to be too nitpicky but depth of field is a function of focal length and aperture size, the film itself is irrelevant. It's just as easy to achieve on digital, not as common on crop sensor sizes (because those introduce a focal length multiplier, thus you need a very light and wide open lens, like f/1.8) but a full frame sensor has the same depth of field as a 35mm film frame.
- enaaem 5y ago
  I understand that. My point is that most personal photos now are shot on phones, while in the past everyone shot full frame.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    I'm in the "Everyone above 30" category, and we shot disposable, not full frame.
    - loser777 5y ago
      I don't understand, disposables commonly used the 35mm film format, which is equivalent to full frame sensor size.
      - Talanes 5y ago
        Huh, til. I had a little Crayola brand camera that fit APS cartridges as a kid, and I had just lived my whole life assuming disposables had a similar "not quite" size film inside. I also haven't actually seen any of those pictures in nearly a decade, because my family lost a storage unit at some point that apparently had all my childhood memorabilia in it. I'm probably remembering them worse than they were.
Aeolun 5y ago
I used to print a selection of my iPhone pictures every few months or so, but the print shop went under and now I’m stuck :/
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Having spent lots of time editing, restoring photos from my family that go back over 100 years, I have watched the evolution of the "consumer camera" (at least as it relates to the kind typically in the possession of the midwest working class). Oldest photo are studio photos (oldest being a tintype, others ... collodion?). Except for the tintype the quality is generally quite nice. Studio lit, static subjects. Then come the 1920's and a decade of non-studio, candid photos that appear to have been shot on a Brownie-style box camera. These are fairly poor quality. In some cases though they are poorly framed (subjects too far from the camera) and so it is as much the fault of the operator as the poor camera. Photos are exclusively outdoors. A handful of studio photos are peppered in these decades, now with school graduation photos, maybe a wedding photo shot professionally. These are quite nice. Maybe the nicest of the first 100 years of photos? Somewhere in the 30's though B&W photos taken on consumer gear begin to appear that are much better in quality. I suspect we've moved past the box-camera and to something more like the folding-style Kodak with better optics. I like this period of candid photos the best — right up until the 40's and 50's. Suddenly though, mid-Century, the photo collection goes to color, some of them Polaroids. Oh wow the quality falls right off again. We're back to the Brownie box-camera in terms of image sharpness, clarity. I think we, as consumers, traded quality for color and instant processing. By the time I am old enough to take pictures (70's) I remember using a Kodak Instamatic (135 film?). Also poor. We had flash of course by then so many more photos go indoors. My mother sometime in the 70's got a Canon AE-1 so 35mm and decent lens (no doubt the kit "nifty 50") make for some of the best amateur photos of the century for our family photos. It is curious that the pattern would sort of repeat in the 21st Century as I switched to digital. I had access early on to digital cameras (part of my job) so I was an early adopter. When they became affordable I began buying and upgrading through a few lines of nice Canon point-and-shoot cameras. This was the beginning of the "megapixel wars". The quality of the images began to get quite nice — Canon optics, aperture-priority, ability to adjust exposure bias... And then sadly, the quality regressed since we lazily turned to relaying on the iPhone camera and early on it was worse than that of the nice Canon cameras. (My wife though had graduated to a Canon Rebel around this time and held on to using it for a while so that many of our vacation photos started to surpass those taken with my mother's 35mm.) As generations of iPhones improved their camera quality, eventually all the Canon gear got left at home since the photo quality of the modern iPhone was "good enough" at last. Playing with lenses, depth of field (no, not the fakey "portrait" kind of computational depth of field) are gone however — I suspect not likely to return. The thinness of the phone means we're not likely ever to see larger apertures where depth of field becomes meaningful. I started to get into Micro-4/3 for a bit, recently picked up a Sony mirrorless, but I suspect the days of automatically strapping on a dedicated camera when we head out to hike, vacation, are now a thing of the past. We'll see.

by enaaem 5y ago

ImprovedSilence 5y ago

Ive actually just started to take the time, once a year, to go through all my phone photos, and print out a couple hundred of them and put them in a photo album. I suspect they’ll still be around when me and my iCloud account are long gone, for the grandkids to discover in their parents basement.

m_st 5y ago

They'll be overwhelmed because there are so many photos and movies. I honestly already struggle to share them all with my kids aged 13 and younger.

teekert 5y ago

"I wonder how someone 40 years in the future would look back at 2021 iPhone pictures of themselves? " I make so many pics and videos that I really hope it will be something like this: "Hey locally run AI that guards my data and privacy, please show me about 100 pictures and videos of holidays when the kids were in the age of 5-10, project them on the wall.", "Yes, that one in the mountains is nice, where is that? Can you show me some more of that holiday?", "How about some videos taken around that era in and around the house?" "Did we have a dog back then?" "Ah yes, there is Bello, what a nice dog that was, when did he die?" [Star Trek computer voice: "last picture of Bello was may 5 2014".] No way I'm ever going to sort this mess manually. TBH, a simple import in Shotwell already works wonders, and I absolutely love the "For You" section in "Photos" on my iPhone, I can get lost in there for a long time, but that's just a bit too much tied to Apple for my taste though, I'll be archiving all those files at some point (to 2 local hdds and then rsync them off-site (aka "my parent's house")). Edit: Maybe, at some point, you can construct an interactive narrative about your life like done in The Orville in "Lasting Impressions" [0]. Why are you all so negative about the future people, you need more Star Trek (or The Orville) in your life ;) Nobody is going to get overwhelmed, we're creating a rich source of information about ourselves and the time we live in, which we will probably never really consume as a series of Photographs, that sounds pretty boring indeed, we can do better, show some creativity! [0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7826096/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7826096/

ekianjo 5y ago
AI can't even be bothered to do half-reliable text translations, seriously doubt that 40 years from now it will work half as well as we imagine it to be. After all, we all imagined back in in the 80s that we would have flying cars and robots around us by 2020's - we should learn that we are constantly bad predictors and completely off the mark.
- teekert 5y ago
  No way. The Photos section of the iPhone Photos app is already almost there. It makes the nicest videos from live photos (.heic), with music and it chooses the nice moments by itself. Maybe this not-super-critical-and-necessarily-100%-specific-part is where AI already shines. The "For You" content has complicated titles like "$kid'sName spring 2020" or "A day in the park, summer 2021" or "Happiness". 40 years is a lot.
- huntertwo 5y ago
  While I agree that the expectations for AI are too high, I think the use case described is almost achievable with today's tech. It's just language processing to process the request (User wants to see dog around this time period in this location) and finding relevant images (find pictures with dog with exif data that matches time period and location).
  - gwern 5y ago
    You could do most of that with some creative use of CLIP. 'Show more of the mountain' is trivial out of the box, and the 'kids aged 5-10' just needs a bit of logic: take a few photos of each kid at various ages 5-10 (perhaps already specified by the user?), embed, average along with the text prompt 'kids aged 5-10', and use those as the targets. 'Around that time' and 'in and around that house' can be done by metadata dates + GPS + image embedding of the 'house' (or just the text embedding of the word 'house'!) to filter photos by date+location, and then similarity to 'house'. And so on. The question there is how to be able to create those queries automatically in response to transcribed user voice commands. But hey, given Codex/Copilot, who can doubt that programming such queries is out of reach of a contemporary NN either?

pilsetnieks 5y ago

> They are often taken on 35 mm film, which means a natural shallow dept off field Not to be too nitpicky but depth of field is a function of focal length and aperture size, the film itself is irrelevant. It's just as easy to achieve on digital, not as common on crop sensor sizes (because those introduce a focal length multiplier, thus you need a very light and wide open lens, like f/1.8) but a full frame sensor has the same depth of field as a 35mm film frame.

enaaem 5y ago
I understand that. My point is that most personal photos now are shot on phones, while in the past everyone shot full frame.
- Talanes 5y ago
  I'm in the "Everyone above 30" category, and we shot disposable, not full frame.
  - loser777 5y ago
    I don't understand, disposables commonly used the 35mm film format, which is equivalent to full frame sensor size.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      Huh, til. I had a little Crayola brand camera that fit APS cartridges as a kid, and I had just lived my whole life assuming disposables had a similar "not quite" size film inside. I also haven't actually seen any of those pictures in nearly a decade, because my family lost a storage unit at some point that apparently had all my childhood memorabilia in it. I'm probably remembering them worse than they were.

Aeolun 5y ago

I used to print a selection of my iPhone pictures every few months or so, but the print shop went under and now I’m stuck :/

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Having spent lots of time editing, restoring photos from my family that go back over 100 years, I have watched the evolution of the "consumer camera" (at least as it relates to the kind typically in the possession of the midwest working class). Oldest photo are studio photos (oldest being a tintype, others ... collodion?). Except for the tintype the quality is generally quite nice. Studio lit, static subjects. Then come the 1920's and a decade of non-studio, candid photos that appear to have been shot on a Brownie-style box camera. These are fairly poor quality. In some cases though they are poorly framed (subjects too far from the camera) and so it is as much the fault of the operator as the poor camera. Photos are exclusively outdoors. A handful of studio photos are peppered in these decades, now with school graduation photos, maybe a wedding photo shot professionally. These are quite nice. Maybe the nicest of the first 100 years of photos? Somewhere in the 30's though B&W photos taken on consumer gear begin to appear that are much better in quality. I suspect we've moved past the box-camera and to something more like the folding-style Kodak with better optics. I like this period of candid photos the best — right up until the 40's and 50's. Suddenly though, mid-Century, the photo collection goes to color, some of them Polaroids. Oh wow the quality falls right off again. We're back to the Brownie box-camera in terms of image sharpness, clarity. I think we, as consumers, traded quality for color and instant processing. By the time I am old enough to take pictures (70's) I remember using a Kodak Instamatic (135 film?). Also poor. We had flash of course by then so many more photos go indoors. My mother sometime in the 70's got a Canon AE-1 so 35mm and decent lens (no doubt the kit "nifty 50") make for some of the best amateur photos of the century for our family photos. It is curious that the pattern would sort of repeat in the 21st Century as I switched to digital. I had access early on to digital cameras (part of my job) so I was an early adopter. When they became affordable I began buying and upgrading through a few lines of nice Canon point-and-shoot cameras. This was the beginning of the "megapixel wars". The quality of the images began to get quite nice — Canon optics, aperture-priority, ability to adjust exposure bias... And then sadly, the quality regressed since we lazily turned to relaying on the iPhone camera and early on it was worse than that of the nice Canon cameras. (My wife though had graduated to a Canon Rebel around this time and held on to using it for a while so that many of our vacation photos started to surpass those taken with my mother's 35mm.) As generations of iPhones improved their camera quality, eventually all the Canon gear got left at home since the photo quality of the modern iPhone was "good enough" at last. Playing with lenses, depth of field (no, not the fakey "portrait" kind of computational depth of field) are gone however — I suspect not likely to return. The thinness of the phone means we're not likely ever to see larger apertures where depth of field becomes meaningful. I started to get into Micro-4/3 for a bit, recently picked up a Sony mirrorless, but I suspect the days of automatically strapping on a dedicated camera when we head out to hike, vacation, are now a thing of the past. We'll see.