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The World’s First U2 Spy Plane Photo Shoot at the Edge of Space
- Thaxll 3y agoHDR looks terrible on those photos. It looks seriously bad.
- marcuskaz 3y agoAgreed, I can't tell if it is real or all generated?
- garblegarble 3y agoNo kidding - despite the fact that the images are all credited as "Photo by", I simply don't believe they are photos. They look more like videogame loading screen artwork (especially the images with engineers working on planes)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sovietmudkipz 3y agoI thought it was universally known that photographs usually have post processing effects (filters) applied to them. Post processing effects allow the artist to place their hand on the picture. It's clear that the photos have been touched by the artist and they have achieved a look that the photographer was going for. Most photographers alter the raw photograph data.
- saiya-jin 3y agoMost serious photographers alter data while not straying far from reality. Cheap instagram-style filters are sign of amateurs trying to grab attention, not pros. Or in 2023 we can call it 'midjourney look'. Whatever the name, it looks cheap to many. Hardly the effect desired by author.
- lm28469 3y ago> I thought it was universally known that photographs usually have post processing effects It is known, but when the end picture looks like a playstation 3 game trailer it's not everybody's cup of tea
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoAll of his photos are highly edited https://www.blairbunting.com/Portfolios/thumbs https://www.blairbunting.com/Portfolios/thumbs
- BaRRaKID 3y agoI don't get how you go and get access to something that not many people get to see, and then you edit the photos so much that they look computer generated. Looking at his portfolio it seems like he his better at photoshop than at taking photos.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoWhy do soldiers need to wear green cammo uniforms indoors in meeting rooms?
- Loughla 3y agoConsistency and uniforms? Uniform dress is kind of a keystone for military service.
- tw1984 3y agolet me translate that - they get asked to do all kinds of useless things so they can always obey the commands given.
- tivert 3y ago> let me translate that - they get asked to do all kinds of useless things so they can always obey the commands given. IMHO, that's a pretty disrespectful take that seems to be founded on stereotypes. The real reason is probably more along the lines of: they work for a big organization, big organizations force "standards" decisions on the grunts that don't make sense in a lot of contexts, and for a multitude of reasons there's no will to change them once made.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoAFAIk, the military also has non-camo uniforms.
- davethedevguy 3y agoI can't speak for the US, but in my country that was sometimes the case, but not always. I was an engineer and had 'non-camo' uniform, and only wore camo in the field or on exercise. People who's job was primarily 'in the field' though (e.g. the Army) didn't have that, and would wear camo as their uniform 90% of the time (the exception was formal dress uniform for parades etc.)
- dingaling 3y ago
- behnamoh 3y agoI think the curvature of the earth on those photos is exaggerated and camera artifacts. If you extrapolate, the earth would be much smaller in these photos.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoThe article takes a lot of creative liberties to make this article, looks like.
- dylan604 3y agoI launched a helium balloon to ~90000' with a couple of GoPros. The footage looks similar.
- mcpackieh 3y agoI'm no flat earth idiot but I can understand why they find such footage unconvincing. Find some gopro videos of tennis players, take a few stills from their videos and try tracing the tennis court lines with a line tool in an image editor. Straight lines on tennis courts turn into curved lines in gopro footage.
- dylan604 3y agoIf you're not going to take the time to learn and understand the physics of lenses while attempting to use images from those lenses as proof of a controversial claim, then buckle up buttercup, as the condescending criticism is going to be fierce. Sheer mockery and laughter will be well deserved.
- enriquto 3y ago> If you extrapolate, the earth would be much smaller in these photos. At that height, the horizon would appear nearly as a perfect straight line. With a pinhole camera, it would be projected as a straight line in the image plane. Thus, the curvature here has to do with the wide-angle geometry of the lens. If the camera was pointing higher, you would see the horizon curved in the other direction (which would look even cooler!).
- equalsione 3y agoAt the risk of joining the tinfoil hat brigade, this is a 70 year old design. The sr 71 is retired and publicly there’s nothing like it. Has aircraft development regressed since the end of the Cold War or are there successors to these craft out there?
- newZWhoDis 3y ago“Complex systems won’t survive the competency crisis”
- HumblyTossed 3y agoWay way way way way too much image processing. Good grief, is reality really that shitty?
- SpaghettiCthulu 3y agoThe couple of photos by Blair Bunting in that article that have people in them look so over processed that I hesitate to believe they aren't entirely AI or otherwise computer generated.
- MerelyMortal 3y agoI don't know. I have pictures of one of NASA's U2's and the cockpit looks completely different. Granted there are different versions of the U2.
- dylan604 3y agoWhile I'll stipulate that every artist is allowed to have their own style, I too would love to have seen some of these same images much less stylized. I want to see the plane! So I would not be buying a coffee table book with this overly stylized imagery, but I'll restrain myself from calling it shitty. Part of the article stipulates that much of the plane is still classified to a certain extent, it could be possible that there were requirements to not show too much detail. That would lend to the highly stylized look to being used. I'd have assumed some photoshopping to paint over areas that needed redacting.
- yathern 3y agoI thought the extreme HDR look went out of fashion when it became too easy for phones to do, and was overused. These pictures don't have bad HDR artifacts (EG haloing) but even a casual observer will notice they don't feel natural at all. It's a shame because the framing and colors of those pictures are really nice, but the contrast (both high and low freq) gives them a completely synthetic feel. I'm guessing the sky was swapped out with a very dramatic overcast version, which also adds to the uncanny valley effect.
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- snakeyjake 3y agoI don't know if HDR that bad should be illegal but it should at least be roundly criticized.
- kookamamie 3y agoI thought I was reading some fantasy article with CGI "photographs" littered all over. Yeah, it's bad.
- desro 3y agoThis is really cool, and the photos are almost surreal.
- DrNosferatu 3y agoA subset of those images strongly seem to have been AI-generated.
- acadapter 3y agoEnough of this over-processed junk, bring back Kodachrome
- throw0101c 3y agoI find it amusing that the photo of the cockpit has 70K feet showing up in the display, which is roughly the unclassified service ceiling: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2#Specifications_(U-2S) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2#Specifications_(U...
- mcpackieh 3y ago> 800x534 This website calls itself "petapixel" yet the images are thumbnail sized.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- haswell 3y agoSo many comments here are casual dismissals of the photographer’s style, and while I generally prefer a lighter touch in post-processing, there are some incredibly cool photos in here, some of which are products of interesting light and canopy effects. I think the artistic decisions make some sense when you consider the purpose of a photo shoot like this. These photos are meant to communicate a story about a mysterious spy plane, and to appeal to a broad audience. For better or worse, people absolutely eat up this art style, which is why I think many here have been conditioned to associate it with cheap digital filters so ubiquitous on social media. Photos of a famous spy plane can’t be seen as less cool than the latest movie franchise, and so I suspect that’s why the military chose to work with a photographer who works in this style. Again, not my first choice, but there’s plenty to appreciate in the work, and some of those photos are not as manipulated as one might suspect, and are products of a camera capable of gathering a ton of light even at low exposures.
- tivert 3y ago> So many comments here are casual dismissals of the photographer’s style, and while I generally prefer a lighter touch in post-processing, there are some incredibly cool photos in here. I kind of feel bad of the photographer, but I think his style has is probably collateral damage of generative "AI." I literally did not believe his photos were real, because the uncanniness and the subject matter just screamed AI-generated to me. Especially that photo of the pilots in the space suits. A lot of the night shots of the plane also looked like renders. It's almost like it's too easy to fake cool, which then devalues cool, so to be believable someone an artist almost has to miss the mark in just the right way. There's probably a deeper point there, but I can't make it.
- bmer 3y agoI would not have guessed that this is a particular post-processing style (I no nothing about photography); my first impression was that some of the pictures were either AI generated (the general aesthetic is quite common in AI generated pictures), or 3D renders. Are there good explanations for why AI generated pictures tend to emulate this particular post-processing style? Is it a simple matter of choice of training data, or does it have to do with the "unnatural smoothness patterns" of the generated (or in the article's case, post-processed) image? Apart from that, I find it quite surprising that this is the first photoshoot. Isn't U2, first and foremost, a high altitude photography platform? Sure, they probably mostly cared about photographing the surface of the planet, and perhaps the plane's (fixed) equipment was even such that it could only photograph the surface. But did no one pilot, co-pilot, etc. ever care to try and take pictures with even a humble consumer camera in a U2? Finally: could the post-processing style have been chosen on purpose to hide details which are (for whatever reason) still "sensitive information"?
- bluenomatterwho 3y agoGoing to go out on a limb and ask if anyone would do forensics on these 'photos.' There is a pretense here, maybe even aside from the door being green, which might justify a little magic.