It’s time someone invents the photograph again, writes Håkan Lindgren. Photo: BECKER + BREDEL GbR / Action Press
Someone should inventing photography again. The photograph has been a very valuable invention, but it is being lost. For we have no cameras anymore. Digital technology gives us a different kind of device, not yet fully developed. It is currently being hatched, and it will differ radically from everything we think of as cameras.
What we’re getting instead? If you put together a variety of small news items, that kind of notes flowing past as a daily siding of teknokuriosa, one can begin to discern it.
We can start with something simple: the camera that can distinguish facial expressions and waits to take a picture until someone smiles. The next step is a bit more advanced. If you take a group picture of his buddies do not smile all the time. Someone might accidentally close your eyes. 2013 HTC presented a mobile phone with one touch burning of 20 pictures and can merge everyone’s “best” facial expression for a group photo. Very convenient – and you’ve just taken a picture of something that has not happened.
The HTC’s camera phone also offers retuschfunktionerna Skin Smoothing and Eye Enhancer plus a feature that allows broad jawbones bit narrower. How much is left of your friends when you take such a picture?
programmers HTC wants to be understood only help us to take pictures where everyone shows its best side, but at now it’s about time to think about what they mean by “best”.
It is easy to continue thinking in the same track: why not an app that washes away the smog? Take a picture of Beijing and the sky is blue. You can get greener trees, better looking tan and so on. Such images are not supported memory. Their information content is comparable to a child’s drawing from the same holiday excursion: the sun is yellow, sea blue and all have happy faces. I look at a family photo from my grandfather’s youth, it is only the unedited makes the picture precious to me: the uncontrolled vitamins, incidental background detail. I suspect that the image is manipulated ceases to speak to me.
In August announced Researchers at MIT that they had developed an algorithm that can remove unwanted obstacles from photographs. If you shoot the view through a window disturbed picture often reflections in the glass. Takes a couple of images from slightly different angles to their software to add images together, subtract reflexes and give you a clear view as if the window was not there. Same thing if you shoot through a mesh fences, or if there is a lamppost in the way. Imagine a camera that has this feature built in. It can get objects in front of the lens to disappear without a trace, it has become something other than a camera.
In addition, all the technology is to change the image after the exposure is made. 2014 gave Adobe a preview of an algorithm that makes it possible in retrospect can choose the time of day of an image: from day to evening to night. The sky darkens, lighting lights, color gamut shift.
A research at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have developed a technique that allows one to enter a photo, pick out an object , turn and twist in three dimensions and to return it to a new location. The prerequisite is that you have a 3D model of the object you want to manipulate, but those are plentiful. Large library of ready, photo-realistic computer models of everything from cutlery and furniture for animals and humans are about to emerge. Visit Turbosquid.com to see how it might look.
In June this year, a research group at the University of Washington that they can take a collection of photos of some, enough to capture the person’s facial expression, and produce a convincing 3D model of the person’s face. The model can then be threaded like a rubber mask on top of a video recording of someone else’s head. They demonstrated their technique in a video clip where the wooden Hillary Clinton’s facial features on top of George Bush’s head and get her to say his lines. Anyone can be a computer animation and made to say anything.
It reminded me, for something I did for a couple of years ago, when Tiger Woods was hits the headlines. Had he collided with the car and fought with his girlfriend? A Taiwanese news site illustrated speculation with a computer animation where Tiger quarreled with Elin Nordegren. The quality of the animation was no better than a clumsy computer games, but it was like getting a preview of the news programs from an unscrupulous future.
By now we know that it is only a matter of time before computer graphics go from embarrassing to photorealistic. Think of the invisible digital special effects that are routinely mixed in the feature film. If speculative or completely false news reports can be just as convincing as the digital effects to the movies, we have no news coverage anymore. Then we are back at the 1500s level: a video no more probative value than a woodcut in which someone has given the Pope ass’s ears. We gears up to 6K can not change that.
to each pixel in digital photo or video can be manipulated totally unlimited means that such images have more in common with drawings and paintings than with the photo. Artists who paint a view has never been disturbed by a fence has been in the way, they’ve moved on trees and houses as needed. The people around the table in Krøyers “Hip hip hurray” smiled probably not at the same time.
Funnily enough, takes this development in digital imaging while having the ability to illustrate the hand disappeared. Look at the ads in the magazines from the 30s, 40s and 50s, or on the future of book covers and movie posters: so much of that was handmade, often impressively skilful. Today is the sort of commercial illustrations are almost always photo-based – when you can no longer draw their ads increases the need to manipulate photographs.
The overall effect of all these innovations means that what we call photograph ceases to exist. Photos have always been retouched, but we are heading into a state where it no longer makes sense to make a difference in digital photography and computer graphics. In this situation, any digital image is considered as if it was just as artificial. Perhaps, in the near future do not understand why we insisted to distinguish between computer games and digital photography, animation and news images. In that situation, it’s time someone invents the photograph again.
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