11 ms·
Two photographers captured the same millisecond in time (2018)
- ArchD 3y agoWhat I want to know is whether those 2 photographers, Ron Risman & Eric Gendron, became friends from this extreme coincidence.
- hef19898 3y agoThat surely is a posibility.
- behringer 3y agoThis would make a fantastic 3d image.
- elf25 3y ago[dead]
- HenryBemis 3y ago1) I remember reading this the first time around, amazing article and analysis 2) dpreview is my go-to website for camera information (as gsmarena is for cellphones)
- randomcarbloke 3y agoSchelling point
- akasakahakada 3y agoWonder what those anti-AI-copyright folks would say. Should two photographers quote each other's work although both are completely original?
- tiffanyh 3y ago> ”Come to find out we were only 28 meters away from each other.” As a point of clarity regarding the title of the article, that means they didn’t take the photo at the same moment. What the title really means is that, the light from this instant in time hit each person camera sensor at the same moment.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shawabawa3 3y agoThis is needlessly pedantic and also wrong Being 28 meters apart makes a maximum 93 nanoseconds difference in time between the light reaching each other The article says "same millisecond", not "same moment". +/- 93 nanoseconds makes no real difference to the resulting image, the photos were likely thousands of nanoseconds apart edit: not to mention photographs don't capture a precise moment in time but a window of time, in this case one of them captured 1ms of time and the other 0.625ms, and those windows overlapped almost entirely
- ajuc 3y agoThis is the best evidence against UFO, ghosts, Nessi, big foot, etc that we have :)
- mikhailfranco 3y agoThe main benefit of photography is not generating a beautiful or popular image, but teaching you how to really see the world, not just look at it in passing, or have it be the unseen background for an unregarded life.
- DrNosferatu 3y agoThe fact that “burst mode” was used makes this coincidence far more likely. Nevertheless, pretty cool ;)
- weugek 3y agoI don't get what's so fascinating here to be honest. There's only 1000 milliseconds in second guys. Imagine how many pictures are taken at the same time in a music concert for example.
- jordanreger 3y agoThis is a fascinating article that covers something I've thought about plenty of times! Genuinely how often do people take virtually the same photo at the same time? You'd think it'd be more often at places like Disney World but it's fascinating to hear it happened in a scenario like this.
- pan69 3y agoOne that I sometimes think about is; how often you end up in other peoples photos? I wish there was an option in e.g. Google Photos where you could share (anonymously?) your photos with people you just happen captured by accident.
- gcau 3y agoWhen you go to an event, you can search "{event.name} {date}" on twitter/youtube and potentially spot yourself. I do that a lot.
- jvm___ 3y agoWe participate in a glo-riders bike ride, so 150-200 bikes/scooters all with various levels of led lights from a strip on your helmet to 500+ synced to a speaker. A bunch of people have Bluetooth speakers playing the playlist of the ride. It's not super well known, so random pedistrians or people at outdoor tables star and record the parade on their phones, so there's multiple videos of us all around town.
- dave8088 3y agoA couple was captured in the same photo at Disney years before they met: https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2010/06/couple-knows-it-really-is-a-small-disney-world-after-all/ https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2010/06/couple-knows-...
- bombcar 3y agoToo bad the link to the original is now dead.
- great_psy 3y agoIn a way this says something about human brains. Presumably both people took many pictures of many waves that day, but somehow both of them decided that this is the one that is the best from that trip. As humans we share a similar metric for beauty. I find this idea simultaneously obviously and amazing.
- sneak 3y agoI think rather than "a similar metric for beauty" that the art of taking photos for retouching and posting on the internet for strangers is such a generally stale and predictable form. I'm a visual artist and I'm so over the standard "internet photographer" look. Who takes pictures of lighthouses? It's so boring. It's always people in the same demographic doing it, too. Give me some variety. Formulaic art is uninspiring.
- Arainach 3y agoClaiming that only unique or original things are good is toxic to growth and the development of culture. Saying "who takes pictures of lighthouses" is like saying "who writes their own [editor/operating system/firewall/whatever], there are already dozens of great ones". People get better by doing, and if they never did anything that had already been done they'd never be any good at all. Besides, Lighthouses are cool and pictures of them are pleasant.
- sneak 3y agoIt's the same demographic that builds an abandonware single user text editor as a hobby that takes the 400th identical photo of a new england lighthouse. As a middle aged white guy myself (who codes and makes visual art) I am constantly reminding myself of the context in which my creations exist and reminding myself to actually be creative when doing so. The millionth photo of something out of the Uffizi with an expensive camera and lens are not things I tend to publish. They're vacation photos, not art.
- Arainach 3y ago
- iramiller 3y agoStories like this remind me that in distributed systems time becomes a very imprecise concept at small scales.
- nixpulvis 3y ago[flagged]
- clnq 3y agoWhat?
- ipython 3y agoThink of it this way: you run a website that displays photos in chronological order. You receive these two photos. Which picture was taken first? How can you tell?
- bentcorner 3y agoI've looked at user telemetry and the conclusion I've come to is that the only time you can trust is from systems under your control (i.e., submission time).
- jonny_eh 3y agoIt's why the US patent system switched from "first to invent" to "first to file" in 2013. The last country to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_invent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_inv...
- clnq 3y agoGot it. Can’t know what time it is exactly if you have 2 clocks.
- SpaceNugget 3y agoThat's not an example of a distributed system, so it doesn't really clear up whatever the GP was trying to say about time in distributed systems at small scales. But even if it was this is nonsensical. The visual content of a photo is generally not what is used to determine the moment in time when it was captured. There's metadata in the image format that specifies when the photo was taken. There are pictures taken at almost the same moment in time all the time around the world, and there are many pictures taken of the same place, what's special about the situation here is that both of those things happened, and the subject isn't hyper famous, and it isn't a static object, so the chances of it happening were very low.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dogman1050 3y agoThis is great! When I look at each picture with one eye simultaneously, I see the image in 3d.
- interestica 3y agoPro tip: this is also how you can quickly solve those "whats different between these images" puzzles.
- Agentlien 3y agoI wonder how widespread this understanding is. I figured it out a few years ago, but haven't heard anyone else mention it. It's a really cool hack.
- hef19898 3y agoI sometimes do, but usually it is more fun doing it the trafitional way with the kids!
- tobr 3y agoI’ve used this technique since I was a kid, and have always been fascinated with how my eyes perceive both a 3d image and simultaneously two separate images overlaid. It’s something I think about many times per day - I mean, I’m looking at stuff all day, and this is such a fundamental aspect of the experience of looking at something. But my impression is that most people are only barely aware of how this works?
- tinix 3y agoObserving the observation. Something zen about it... Don't think but it just is.
- ghastmaster 3y agoI have only told two people this trick. You have now told considerably more. I am truly hurt.
- jhncls 3y agoSee also this previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16542395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16542395
- mherdeg 3y ago(I realize that there are a few details that you can use to tell these apart, but,) Who gets to register the copyright on the image?
- howenterprisey 3y agoI'd imagine there are two images so there are two copyrights.
- thih9 3y agoThere would be two copyright holders, one for each image. Even if they left the lens caps on and both images were black on black, there would be two distinguishable images with e.g.: different exif data, sensor noise, etc.
- throwaway290 3y agoThe scene is not subject to copyright (naturally occurring). If we pretend that camera sensor captures are exactly the same, then I guess it does not belong to a single photographer in this case. But usually no one cares about sensor data, people care about "deliverables", like JPEGs or printed versions, and they will not be the same because everything after sensor capture would be different for each photographer.
- tantalor 3y agoWhat do you mean by "scene"? Like, the state of the world at the time of the photograph? Why would anyone think that was "subject to copyright"?
- throwaway290 3y ago> What do you mean by "scene"? Photons mostly > Why would anyone think that was "subject to copyright"? Scene itself is absolutely ""subject to copyright"" in many cases, like when it's set up by photographer or includes recognizable people (they can sue you if you sell a street shot with their face)
- 3y ago
- drewtato 3y agoReading the title, I thought it would be this photo, which memed around Japan internet recently: https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/2BPJTHASHJLBVNYHT43HFG37DM.jpg https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuter... These two exposures surely overlapped, with the known photo probably exposing for tens of milliseconds on either side of the flash, but the lighthouse exposures might not have overlapped at all, yet captured a far more exact slice of time regardless.
- prmoustache 3y agoWould you be so kind to share the context of that picture?
- dredmorbius 3y agoPost-game celebration in Japan: <https://www.reuters.com/sports/baseball/tigers-fans-take-it-easy-after-pennant-win-japan-2023-09-15/ https://www.reuters.com/sports/baseball/tigers-fans-take-it-...> The two "simultaneous" images are the one linked, and presumably the one taken by the woman whose camera flash is seen fully illuminated in the first picture, though as I've described, there might actually be a considerable difference the moments exposed due to flash sync speeds.
- dredmorbius 3y agoThe old rule for shooting flash photography was to set a relatively slow sync speed with a shutter & film-based camera to ensure that the flash itself occurred whilst the shutter was open, and when the shutter was fully open. So the precise timing of the flash needn't coincide with the moment captured on film. A focal-plane shutter actually consists of two "curtains", front and rear, which expose the film in a slot at high speeds. Below a sufficiently slow speed, the shutter is fully open for a period of time, which is what is necessary for flash photography. Shooting either unsyncronised (shutter opens or closes before flash fires), or at too high a speed where the entire frame isn't exposed at once results in a partially-exposed shot (example in the first image in the Wikipedia article below). That was usually 1/60th of a second, or slower, and some interesting effects can be had when shooting with a flash, or multiple flashes, on a scene that's otherwise lit. It's also possible to sync the flash to the beginning or end of a long(er) exposure, which has the effect of either capturing the beginning or ending of a movement sequence. Rear-curtain sync is popular and shows the subject moving toward its final position which is fully illuminated by the flash. <https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/tutorials/rear-curtain-sync-create-light-streak-photography-with-second-curtain-sync https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/tutorials/rear-curtain-sy...> The two cameras in the Japanese photo (the one capturing the flash of the other, which you show, and the image taken by the camera with the visible flash) likely occurred within 1/60th of a second of one another, but might differ in exposure start/end by as much as twice that interval, or 1/30th of a second. What we can be reasonably certain of is that when the flash fired, both shutters were open, but that's a relatively long period, photographically, at 16.7 1/1000ths of a second. Some modern phones, and possibly smartphone cameras, may have a faster effective flash synch, particularly if they use an electronic shutter. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_synchronization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_synchronization>
- bean-weevil 3y agoI'm surprised that the exif data was accurate to the millisecond. Quartz clocks won't typically maintain that precision over the course of a single day.
- xhrpost 3y agoIf the camera is pulling location from GPS then it's likely pulling time from it as well.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thih9 3y agoDid anyone actually look at the milliseconds? I thought it was just a reasonable guess — based on the incredible similarity of the waves.
- mmoskal 3y agoIf the water is moving at 10m/s and you can spot 0.1m difference in the photo then it would need to be within 10ms of each other.
- mrb 3y agoI cropped the pictures, and rotated Ron's picture by 0.2° (it wasn't perfectly vertical), so as to line them up on the lighthouse's door: https://i.imgur.com/ISIGQrR.png https://i.imgur.com/ISIGQrR.png https://i.imgur.com/qLtZprZ.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/qLtZprZ.jpeg Open both in 2 tabs on a computer, and quickly alternate between the 2 tabs, the 3D effect is quite visible because of the perspective differential :-)
- jdthedisciple 3y agoWhy does there seem to be a skew though?
- pimlottc 3y agoWorks well with cross-eyed viewing too, with the images side-by-side: https://jsfiddle.net/pimlottc/f1saz46m/1/show https://jsfiddle.net/pimlottc/f1saz46m/1/show
- Fatnino 3y agoThis doesn't work on mobile because jsfiddle has that little overlay in the top corner covering most of the picture
- pimlottc 3y agoIt's not so bad in landscape mode for me, try that perhaps?
- ern 3y agoYou can delete the overlay using dev tools. In Chrome, I hit F12, selected the overlay in the DOM and deleted it.
- margalabargala 3y agoI doubt the person you replied to has F12 available on their mobile device.