3 ms·

That's really good news. It's pretty nice to see the younger generation ditching the hyper-processed type of photos you get from a smartphone for a more 'authen

That's really good news. It's pretty nice to see the younger generation ditching the hyper-processed type of photos you get from a smartphone for a more 'authentic' look at life.

crazygringo 2y ago
Film is lots of things aesthetically, but it's certainly not "authentic". You don't have to hyper-process smartphone photos, there are plenty of apps that let you just take a "normal" picture. And the colors from a CMOS image sensor are far more accurate -- i.e. "authentic" -- than the responses from color film. Every type of film is, well -- opinionated, let's say. It has its own look. Which can be nice, and you can simulate it digitally as well. But it's less "authentic" to reality, not more.
- chongli 2y ago
  Authenticity and accuracy are distinct concepts. Authenticity refers to artistic sensibility. It has nothing to do with scientifically correct rendering.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Can you elaborate? What would it mean, then for one art technology to be more "authentic" than another? How could you ever say that film images were more authentic than digital images? Would you say watercolors are more authentic than oil, or vice-versa? I can understand how one filmmaker might capture a more "authentic" experience of a topic in their movie than another, via their knowledge and written script and direction. Someone who deeply understands their subject. But I fail to understand how shooting on film vs digital would change that (unless you're aiming for a certain historical look).
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      It basically comes down to an old vs. new divide, that is subjectively split at some point in the past. Authentic referring to "the old way" or "the way it used to be done". Used in this context, it's a word that has a fuzzy definition but enough common overlap between everyone's definition that it still works to convey an idea. Its more of a common parlance definition than a strict dictionary one.
      - crazygringo 2y ago
        Is it though? That's certainly not how I've ever understood "authentic". Authentic generally means "not fake" -- not a replica, or else experiencing period art using period implements. E.g. playing retro video games on CRT's is more authentic to what the gaming was actually like in the 80's. Or playing Bach on period instruments is more authentic to how he would have heard his music performed. Or making sure you have period-appropriate architecture and props and clothing in a period show. But the idea that old is inherently more authentic than new is a bizarre idea to me. I would disagree vehemently with that notion -- it seems a kind of harmful prejudice against the present, in favor of the "good old days". Is that really what people think authenticity is? Just... being old? It seems totally wrong to me, but I'm open to hearing if that really is commonly understood meaning.
        etrautmann 2y ago
        The key idea here is that authenticity has to be relative to a reference. It’s not clear what that reference is for new photos taken today, unless you mean that the experience or photos are more authentic to a previous era.
    - chongli 2y ago
      I think authenticity is usually connected to traditional techniques as well as a sense of originality. A clear example of the latter is the original Mona Lisa [1] and the Prado Mona Lisa [2]. While I think most people on the street would argue that the Prado is more beautiful than the original due to its better colour rendition, it is definitely not more authentic since it is a copy (and has undergone a much more dramatic restoration). I wouldn't say watercolours are more or less authentic than oil paintings, but the two physical media are definitely more authentic than digital painting software which attempts to simulate watercolours and oil paints. One is a simulation, the other is the real thing. There's also a more intangible aspect to authenticity, often termed authenticity of experience. For film photography, in the context of the article's report on growing film sales, the subject of the experience is the photographer's. Making a photograph with a film camera is a more authentic experience because it is more manual, more hands-on. There are, of course, late-model film cameras with highly sophisticated light meters and fully automatic exposure programs but those aren't what I am referring to. I am talking about older film cameras such as Leicas or Hasselblads or even large format view cameras. The process of making a photograph with one of these tools is very mechanical, very deliberate, and very far from the software-driven "point & shoot" style of smartphone photography. In many ways, this physicality of process is analogous to the authenticity of experience people get from driving a car with a manual transmission. It makes them feel more connected to the process. It gives them a lot more control and freedom, while also giving them a lot of freedom to make mistakes. Although we might think the latter a bug rather than a feature, when it comes to art the process of learning is all about making mistakes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa_(Prado) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa_(Prado)
- leonheld 2y ago
  Sure, there's always a stylistic option with colour, I get that. I don't really conflate "realism" with "authenticity" however. There's something special about getting a roll of film - which has an opinionated chemistry, so to say - and a fixed lens and just shooting life around you. More dynamic, truer to the moment in my humble opinion. edit: I think the adjective I'm looking for is 'candid', perhaps.
  - etrautmann 2y ago
    I love shooting film but IMO this is just a matter of emotional taste. There’s no such thing as “truer” except in how a photo feels to you based on the emotions it conjures. If the process of shooting film feels more natural to you then great! I’m not sure there’s any way to argue it objectively though.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 2y ago
  Slide films, which are what I was most familiar with, tended to have a certain look. You had warmer films (originally Lumiere?), more naturalistic films (Kodachrome especially), whatever Velvia was which I never liked... Of course, speed/grian/contrast factored in as well.
- thrdbndndn 2y ago
  Since you specifically mentioned "plenty of apps", I think you already understand that nowadays most of default Camera apps on smartphone create hyper-processed type of photos, and that's exactly what OP means. <1% of people will bother to install a separate app; so I think it's fair call photos from smartphones less authentic than the ones on film in this regard.
- zdyn5 2y ago
  No, CMOS image sensor Bayer RAWs are not accurate to what we actually see. Just a few of the many things that need to be addressed to get an even “normal” looking image: 1) They’re overly green because the greens of the RGGB color filter array are more sensitive to light than the other colors. This needs to be corrected with nontrivial auto-white-balance algorithms (not only the green bias needs to be fixed but other scene-dependent factors) 2) The Bayer pattern of the color filter array creates a checkerboard color pattern that needs to be fixed with debayering/demosaicing algorithms - again nontrivial if you don’t want to create artifacts or overblur with simplistic interpolation approaches, and there are even ML algorithms that do this now. 3) Bayer RAWs are linear in photon intensity which is not accurate to how our visual system compresses the high dynamic range. Therefore, various tone mapping algorithms are required to reproduce a natural-looking tone/intensity map of the scene. 4) Small sensors can’t collect enough light and this inhererently results in noisy raw images that need to be denoised. There are a lot of different denoising approaches (including modern that are basically all ML), but care needs to be taken as this is one of the places where it’s easy to generate an overly-processed image. There are a lot more steps that happen in a typical image processing pipeline, while yes can be tuned in non-ideal ways to produce overly-processed-feeling images, but are at the end of the day necessary if you don’t want something that looks like these: https://images.app.goo.gl/neJCHk5QsVt68XpL7 https://images.app.goo.gl/neJCHk5QsVt68XpL7
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    But all that is just tuning, and demosaicing is only non-trivial if you want to "fake" a higher resolution -- otherwise just downsample. Same with denoising. The main point is actually what you say in #3 -- that they are linear. That's what I mean by being accurate. Compressing the dynamic range is an artistic choice that will not make an image look like what our eyes see. Film, for example, is more tolerant to overexposure because it has a nonlinear response -- but that's objectively incorrect. Our eyes already compress the dynamic range in a kind of ~logarithmic way. So you don't want to do that on image data, or it ends up being done twice! Which is precisely why bad HDR images can look so fake. Artistically you'll always have to deal with whether you want to compress dynamic range and how. But my main point stands -- the data coming from CMOS is objectively accurate in a way that film is not. It's linear. It's not compressing range at the top or anything like that, or oversaturating certain colors, etc.
nullstyle 2y ago
There's more to digital photography than filters. I would never give up Live Photos.
- kleiba 2y ago
  Live Photos is the first thing I deactivate.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    We have a lot of fun with Live Photos, but it might be due to having little kids.
- leonheld 2y ago
  > A Live Photo captures what happens just before and after you take a photo, including the audio. That's very interesting, I wasn't aware of this feature. I Googled and on Samsung smartphones it seems to be called "Motion Photo". I'll check it out later, thanks for the tip.
  - nullstyle 2y ago
    most welcome!
- firesteelrain 2y ago
  Live Photos are different but there have been times when I was happy I had Live Photos turned on like when I come across an old Live Photo of a pet.
  - nullstyle 2y ago
    Exactly. you get it. I would never trade that capability to go back to film. Going back to film is some hipster nonsense in my opinion, outside of someone trying to make art. You do you, but that's not the photography I do, or want to do. My photography is about connecting better to my past, and the trajectory of development over the past 20 years has been wonderful to me. To go further: Given the failure of apple vision pro, I feel sad about the slowed adoption of Spatial Video. The experience of seeing the spatial video of a loved one who has passed on was incredibly profound for me -- in my specific case a beloved pet -- and I think it would be for many others too. Like live photos, spatial video brings an entirely new dimension and fidelity to my recorded memories, and they are priceless.
chongli 2y ago
There's also a more tactile, grounded feel to film photography. Since you can't just take a test picture and look at the histogram to correct the exposure (or even just dial back on the flashing highlights) you need to know everything in advance. Using a light meter helps but more traditionally photographers relied on a zone system, a conservative shutter speed, and push processing when needed.
PaulHoule 2y ago
I don't want film back. I can go to a sports game with a digital camera and come back with 700 images. It would cost hundreds of dollars to do that with film. It used to be that wedding photographers had to use a medium format camera to shoot group pictures, now you can do it easily with a 35mm digital camera. Last year I came back from a volleyball game completely defeated. Some of it was my lack of skill but some was a lack of light. Some other photogs recommended DxO software which does digital noise reduction. I can now shoot at ISO 10000 or more and have very little sign of noise. I had fallen out of a photography for a bit last summer but then went out for a hike planning to get back into it. I realized when I was out there I'd put the wrong lens on. I had planned to use a really good Zeiss lens but instead I had the cheap lens that came with the camera that has the ugliest bokeh of any lens I've seen that isn't a trick lens. I figured with noise reduction I could stop the aperture as much as I could which I found turns "ugly" into "opinionated" and with some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking to take back a little of the softness of the small aperture and color grading I developed what I call the "Monkey Run Style". https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3l6vvs62jlg2g https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3l6vvs62jlg2g You could have taken pictures like that with film but would have needed a tripod.
- lm28469 2y ago
  > I can go to a sports game with a digital camera and come back with 700 images. Cool, but there are other use cases. I shoot maybe 10-15 rolls a year, I remember vividly every single time I pressed the shutter for the few dozens shots I truly love. Compared to my backlog of thousands of digital snapshits I never even bother looking at... Hundreds of gigs sleeping somewhere on one of my portable hdds. Meanwhile my film pics fit in a thick binder, 10 years of pictures, usually looking at the negatives from arms length is enough to identify them and remember when/where I was, with whom, &c.

That's really good news. It's pretty nice to see the younger generation ditching the hyper-processed type of photos you get from a smartphone for a more 'authentic' look at life.

crazygringo 2y ago

Film is lots of things aesthetically, but it's certainly not "authentic". You don't have to hyper-process smartphone photos, there are plenty of apps that let you just take a "normal" picture. And the colors from a CMOS image sensor are far more accurate -- i.e. "authentic" -- than the responses from color film. Every type of film is, well -- opinionated, let's say. It has its own look. Which can be nice, and you can simulate it digitally as well. But it's less "authentic" to reality, not more.

chongli 2y ago
Authenticity and accuracy are distinct concepts. Authenticity refers to artistic sensibility. It has nothing to do with scientifically correct rendering.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Can you elaborate? What would it mean, then for one art technology to be more "authentic" than another? How could you ever say that film images were more authentic than digital images? Would you say watercolors are more authentic than oil, or vice-versa? I can understand how one filmmaker might capture a more "authentic" experience of a topic in their movie than another, via their knowledge and written script and direction. Someone who deeply understands their subject. But I fail to understand how shooting on film vs digital would change that (unless you're aiming for a certain historical look).
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    It basically comes down to an old vs. new divide, that is subjectively split at some point in the past. Authentic referring to "the old way" or "the way it used to be done". Used in this context, it's a word that has a fuzzy definition but enough common overlap between everyone's definition that it still works to convey an idea. Its more of a common parlance definition than a strict dictionary one.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Is it though? That's certainly not how I've ever understood "authentic". Authentic generally means "not fake" -- not a replica, or else experiencing period art using period implements. E.g. playing retro video games on CRT's is more authentic to what the gaming was actually like in the 80's. Or playing Bach on period instruments is more authentic to how he would have heard his music performed. Or making sure you have period-appropriate architecture and props and clothing in a period show. But the idea that old is inherently more authentic than new is a bizarre idea to me. I would disagree vehemently with that notion -- it seems a kind of harmful prejudice against the present, in favor of the "good old days". Is that really what people think authenticity is? Just... being old? It seems totally wrong to me, but I'm open to hearing if that really is commonly understood meaning.
      - etrautmann 2y ago
        The key idea here is that authenticity has to be relative to a reference. It’s not clear what that reference is for new photos taken today, unless you mean that the experience or photos are more authentic to a previous era.
  - chongli 2y ago
    I think authenticity is usually connected to traditional techniques as well as a sense of originality. A clear example of the latter is the original Mona Lisa [1] and the Prado Mona Lisa [2]. While I think most people on the street would argue that the Prado is more beautiful than the original due to its better colour rendition, it is definitely not more authentic since it is a copy (and has undergone a much more dramatic restoration). I wouldn't say watercolours are more or less authentic than oil paintings, but the two physical media are definitely more authentic than digital painting software which attempts to simulate watercolours and oil paints. One is a simulation, the other is the real thing. There's also a more intangible aspect to authenticity, often termed authenticity of experience. For film photography, in the context of the article's report on growing film sales, the subject of the experience is the photographer's. Making a photograph with a film camera is a more authentic experience because it is more manual, more hands-on. There are, of course, late-model film cameras with highly sophisticated light meters and fully automatic exposure programs but those aren't what I am referring to. I am talking about older film cameras such as Leicas or Hasselblads or even large format view cameras. The process of making a photograph with one of these tools is very mechanical, very deliberate, and very far from the software-driven "point & shoot" style of smartphone photography. In many ways, this physicality of process is analogous to the authenticity of experience people get from driving a car with a manual transmission. It makes them feel more connected to the process. It gives them a lot more control and freedom, while also giving them a lot of freedom to make mistakes. Although we might think the latter a bug rather than a feature, when it comes to art the process of learning is all about making mistakes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa_(Prado) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa_(Prado)
leonheld 2y ago
Sure, there's always a stylistic option with colour, I get that. I don't really conflate "realism" with "authenticity" however. There's something special about getting a roll of film - which has an opinionated chemistry, so to say - and a fixed lens and just shooting life around you. More dynamic, truer to the moment in my humble opinion. edit: I think the adjective I'm looking for is 'candid', perhaps.
- etrautmann 2y ago
  I love shooting film but IMO this is just a matter of emotional taste. There’s no such thing as “truer” except in how a photo feels to you based on the emotions it conjures. If the process of shooting film feels more natural to you then great! I’m not sure there’s any way to argue it objectively though.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ghaff 2y ago
Slide films, which are what I was most familiar with, tended to have a certain look. You had warmer films (originally Lumiere?), more naturalistic films (Kodachrome especially), whatever Velvia was which I never liked... Of course, speed/grian/contrast factored in as well.
thrdbndndn 2y ago
Since you specifically mentioned "plenty of apps", I think you already understand that nowadays most of default Camera apps on smartphone create hyper-processed type of photos, and that's exactly what OP means. <1% of people will bother to install a separate app; so I think it's fair call photos from smartphones less authentic than the ones on film in this regard.
zdyn5 2y ago
No, CMOS image sensor Bayer RAWs are not accurate to what we actually see. Just a few of the many things that need to be addressed to get an even “normal” looking image: 1) They’re overly green because the greens of the RGGB color filter array are more sensitive to light than the other colors. This needs to be corrected with nontrivial auto-white-balance algorithms (not only the green bias needs to be fixed but other scene-dependent factors) 2) The Bayer pattern of the color filter array creates a checkerboard color pattern that needs to be fixed with debayering/demosaicing algorithms - again nontrivial if you don’t want to create artifacts or overblur with simplistic interpolation approaches, and there are even ML algorithms that do this now. 3) Bayer RAWs are linear in photon intensity which is not accurate to how our visual system compresses the high dynamic range. Therefore, various tone mapping algorithms are required to reproduce a natural-looking tone/intensity map of the scene. 4) Small sensors can’t collect enough light and this inhererently results in noisy raw images that need to be denoised. There are a lot of different denoising approaches (including modern that are basically all ML), but care needs to be taken as this is one of the places where it’s easy to generate an overly-processed image. There are a lot more steps that happen in a typical image processing pipeline, while yes can be tuned in non-ideal ways to produce overly-processed-feeling images, but are at the end of the day necessary if you don’t want something that looks like these: https://images.app.goo.gl/neJCHk5QsVt68XpL7 https://images.app.goo.gl/neJCHk5QsVt68XpL7
- crazygringo 2y ago
  But all that is just tuning, and demosaicing is only non-trivial if you want to "fake" a higher resolution -- otherwise just downsample. Same with denoising. The main point is actually what you say in #3 -- that they are linear. That's what I mean by being accurate. Compressing the dynamic range is an artistic choice that will not make an image look like what our eyes see. Film, for example, is more tolerant to overexposure because it has a nonlinear response -- but that's objectively incorrect. Our eyes already compress the dynamic range in a kind of ~logarithmic way. So you don't want to do that on image data, or it ends up being done twice! Which is precisely why bad HDR images can look so fake. Artistically you'll always have to deal with whether you want to compress dynamic range and how. But my main point stands -- the data coming from CMOS is objectively accurate in a way that film is not. It's linear. It's not compressing range at the top or anything like that, or oversaturating certain colors, etc.

nullstyle 2y ago

There's more to digital photography than filters. I would never give up Live Photos.

kleiba 2y ago
Live Photos is the first thing I deactivate.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  We have a lot of fun with Live Photos, but it might be due to having little kids.
leonheld 2y ago
> A Live Photo captures what happens just before and after you take a photo, including the audio. That's very interesting, I wasn't aware of this feature. I Googled and on Samsung smartphones it seems to be called "Motion Photo". I'll check it out later, thanks for the tip.
- nullstyle 2y ago
  most welcome!
firesteelrain 2y ago
Live Photos are different but there have been times when I was happy I had Live Photos turned on like when I come across an old Live Photo of a pet.
- nullstyle 2y ago
  Exactly. you get it. I would never trade that capability to go back to film. Going back to film is some hipster nonsense in my opinion, outside of someone trying to make art. You do you, but that's not the photography I do, or want to do. My photography is about connecting better to my past, and the trajectory of development over the past 20 years has been wonderful to me. To go further: Given the failure of apple vision pro, I feel sad about the slowed adoption of Spatial Video. The experience of seeing the spatial video of a loved one who has passed on was incredibly profound for me -- in my specific case a beloved pet -- and I think it would be for many others too. Like live photos, spatial video brings an entirely new dimension and fidelity to my recorded memories, and they are priceless.

chongli 2y ago

There's also a more tactile, grounded feel to film photography. Since you can't just take a test picture and look at the histogram to correct the exposure (or even just dial back on the flashing highlights) you need to know everything in advance. Using a light meter helps but more traditionally photographers relied on a zone system, a conservative shutter speed, and push processing when needed.

PaulHoule 2y ago

I don't want film back. I can go to a sports game with a digital camera and come back with 700 images. It would cost hundreds of dollars to do that with film. It used to be that wedding photographers had to use a medium format camera to shoot group pictures, now you can do it easily with a 35mm digital camera. Last year I came back from a volleyball game completely defeated. Some of it was my lack of skill but some was a lack of light. Some other photogs recommended DxO software which does digital noise reduction. I can now shoot at ISO 10000 or more and have very little sign of noise. I had fallen out of a photography for a bit last summer but then went out for a hike planning to get back into it. I realized when I was out there I'd put the wrong lens on. I had planned to use a really good Zeiss lens but instead I had the cheap lens that came with the camera that has the ugliest bokeh of any lens I've seen that isn't a trick lens. I figured with noise reduction I could stop the aperture as much as I could which I found turns "ugly" into "opinionated" and with some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking to take back a little of the softness of the small aperture and color grading I developed what I call the "Monkey Run Style". https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3l6vvs62jlg2g https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3l6vvs62jlg2g You could have taken pictures like that with film but would have needed a tripod.

lm28469 2y ago
> I can go to a sports game with a digital camera and come back with 700 images. Cool, but there are other use cases. I shoot maybe 10-15 rolls a year, I remember vividly every single time I pressed the shutter for the few dozens shots I truly love. Compared to my backlog of thousands of digital snapshits I never even bother looking at... Hundreds of gigs sleeping somewhere on one of my portable hdds. Meanwhile my film pics fit in a thick binder, 10 years of pictures, usually looking at the negatives from arms length is enough to identify them and remember when/where I was, with whom, &c.