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Comment by Lagged2Death | Hacker News Reader

When a topic like self-driving vehicles comes up, the Hacker News crowd is mainly in favor: “Creative destruction! Disruption! Go go gadget robots!” Not surprising. How many Hacker News readers drive trucks or taxis for a living? How many regard commuting as an enjoyable hobby?

Photography, on the other hand, is a very common hobby in the tech community. And the comments here seem to reflect that this effort strikes a little close to home: “Those pictures are lousy, if you find them appealing you have no taste! Just because they're 'professional' doesn't mean they're good! Machines can’t replace human judgment, they have no soul! I bet that machine had a lot of human help!”

Tech people may tell you great stories about meritocracy and reason, but in the end we are just emotional monkeys. Like the rest of humanity.

Those of us who can accept this may at least aspire to be wise monkeys.

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Ha, I'm one of those techies you're talking about. Spent an embarrassing amount on camera gear, and I'm always "that guy" with the ridiculous rig at someone's casual party.

But you know what? I love this shit. I like photography for the good photos, not because I'm building my self esteem on top of it. I want to capture the scene or the moment in a way that, IMO, does it justice. If this technology makes that easier, and gives it to more people - great. Progress.

And what I really love is how it subtracts a huge amount from the price of entry. It's like when software synths came out and made it possible to make music without $10k+ worth of MIDI hardware. What followed? An explosion of creativity which I've been luxuriating in ever since. Get the ability to create beautiful images in as many hands as possible, says I. For me, at least, "more beautiful images in the world" was the whole idea.

Honestly, this "creative destruction" has already to some extent entered the photography field. You can take very capable, often professional looking photographs for the vast majority of circumstances with just your phone.

There are still many situations where more professional expertise is required (portrait photography is probably one of the best examples, knowledge of proper lighting is still required for best results). But I've gotten the impression that overall demand for photographers -- and pay -- is slower these days, largely due to technological advances. (See articles like this: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/media/30photogs.h...)

In a way, this is fine though -- as you say, it gives power to more people, which is great.

Per the parent post's point, to be honest, I perceived much of the criticism to be more that they really couldn't think of a good way to use it in their own hobby level work. I personally can't think of a good use case. On the other hand, the most useful application I can think of for this is more in reverse: social media companies with huge image libraries their users have graciously "donated" to them, could use this AI algorithm or something similar to pick, or construct, the most "professional" looking image of anything they can identify from their vast library, and sell it or license it to media / content publishers for a relatively low cost. Such could be but one more competitor to any professional landscape / scenery photographers out there.

It's true that a phone today an produce a photo that's technically pretty good. I've got a friend who's had shows of iPhone photos, and won numerous awards with them.

This doesn't mean that someone armed with their phone will take good photos. There's still the matter of composition, as well as capturing the "the decisive moment"[1].

The tool described in the OP provides an automated means of finding some worthwhile composition within a library of images, thus providing an aid to someone less skilled at composition - although it's not going to produce something from nothing. If the photographer failed to point the camera in the direction of the best photo, then they've failed.

But I can't see any way that automated tools can, after the fact, help us to capture that decisive moment.

[1] http://truecenterpublishing.com/photopsy/decisive_moment.htm

Would frame extracted from a 120 fps video might help for this. If it's possible to learn composition, I think that selection of the decisive moment is reachable.

There is no such thing as a wise monkey. Take everything you said and remove the possible upside, and that is the truth.

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