Technology

While I agree with what you are saying, I think audiences crave the falsehoods strongly, regardless of how the sausage is made. And I know that the technology itself may be regulated for normal consumers, while 'professionals' will use their wealth to get another set of technology that does it better. Much like in the USA prostitution is generally illegal, but filing sex for pornography media is legal. There really are not very many preaching to level the playing fields on media production hardware. And if you look at the energy requirements and cost of a high-end GPU just as run-time, you can start to get the sense of how a $15,000 camera is going to be able to do post-production that a consumer smartphone won't have.

Analog cameras don't have the dynamic range of human vision, fall quite short in the gamut area, use various grain sizes, and can take vastly different photos depending on aperture shape (bokeh), F stop, shutter speed, particular lens, focal plane alignment, and so on.

More basically, human eyes can change focus and aperture when looking at different parts of a scene, which photos don't allow.

To take a "real photo", one would have to capture a HDR light field, then present it in a way an eye could focus and adjust to any point of it. There used to be a light field digital camera, but the resolution was horrible, and no HDR.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_field_camera

Everything else, is subject to more or less interpretation... and in particular phone cameras, have to correct for some crazy diffraction effects because of the tiny sensors they use.

The end goal should be some kind of representation of reality, at the very least, even if it'd not "what we see naturally". A camera can see some things that we can't, and can't see some things that we can - at least in a single exposure - so, the image is never going be a perfect visual representation of how anyone remembers the scene.

But to suggest that they don't represent some aspect of reality because they're a simulacrum generated by visual data is just self-indulgent too-convenient-to-not-embrace pseudo-philosophy coming from someone whose wealth is tied to selling such bullshit to the public.

The goal here is to make people feel like they're good at something - taking photos - by manufacturing the result, which not only totally defeats the point of what most people take photos for, but has some incredibly dark and severe edge cases which they clearly haven't considered (and are motivated to not consider).

Which is just par for the course for tech bros.

It depends on the artistic and technological intent I think. Valve (tube) amplifiers are inferior to any modern amplifier in every way you could actually measure with an oscilloscope yet people still build them and valves are still produced they same way they were in the 1950s because the imperfections they produce in the sound can sound pleasant, which is down to psychoacoustic factors which have subjective as well as objective components. A photo that looks exactly like what we’d see naturally is one potential goal but it’s not the only one in my opinion.

Thanks Jayden

I'm glad someone else said it.

It's not BS, it's reality. Photo evidence is as valid as its chain of custody, since long before AI or even Photoshop:

https://www.openculture.com/2017/08/long-before-photoshop-the-soviets-mastered-the-art-of-erasing-people-from-photographs-and-history-too.html

@Fizz yep, absolutely. Only with an analog camera you can catch the image exactly as it is. Others are just tweaked to be displayed as real as possible.

@leo

my Pixel, and many other digital cameras, can shoot "raw" images

The raw data a tiny phone sensor with tiny lenses captures is highly distorted, with strong chromatic aberration and diffraction effects. They only go away (to an extent) with large sensor cameras, and high end lenses.

If the "raw" images that Pixel produces have none of those distortions, then they aren't raw.

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