Two Photographers Unknowingly Shot the Same Millisecond in Time
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
The sheer improbability of two photographers capturing the same wave in the exact same way from meters apart and publishing the same shot is captivating. There are thousands of waves daily, and thousands of interesting places to capture them.
say if it was a photo group... then the chance of same shot being outputted is even greater
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> You cannot visit calculatedimages.blogspot.com right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later.
Maybe some MITM on your network? Dodgy SSL certs in your OS?
Blogspot is a google operated domain after all.
I don't use Chrome but I find it hard to believe that Chrome now distrusts Google's own CAs. A user errors seems more likely :)
Whatever one thinks of Google, it's hard to not agree that they take security very seriously, both internal and external (and project zero is one of the best thing ever).
Personally, I prefer it that way. Better to see "ahah, Google tells me Google is insecure" than allowing something flagged as bad just because it come from the same mothership.
I completely agree. Don’t think I stated otherwise?
Anyway, I find it hard to believe for any browser to untrust Google’s intermediate CA. And more so for Global Sign.
That said I recon that especially if Chrome started distruating Google CA that we all heard about it ;)
I'm getting a different cert at least. No cert errors.
Both certs have same common name, etc. But that's where the similarities end.
This is the cert I'm getting:
Serial number: 4254239493315191306
Validity: Tuesday, 20 February 2018 - Tuesday, 15 May 2018
Public key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
Signature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
Perhaps Google uses multiple certs with same Common Name on different servers. If so, I wonder if there's some security benefit.
Or what could the reason for that be?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/insider/freezing-temperat...
Not only did I find that I was (barely) in the picture, but I had a picture of the photographer either before or after he took that picture (not at the same time, obviously, since I was turned the other way at the time of his picture):
I love how completely and dramatically different those two photos of the same place and time are. The reporter was telling a story of somewhere remote and hard to get to and barely touched by humans. One single sturdy but old Siberian looking truck and a half dozen crazy scientists in front of vast stretches of nothing but snow. And yours is showing a bit more of the day in the life there for humans standing next to an airport. The real dot on the i, and extra minor coincidence is the jet taking off right next to the reporter's head. Both photos are true, and both photos, one could say, give misleading impressions taken only on their own.
McMurdo is an interesting place with a lot of fascinating people and the scenery is very beautiful. As our balloon launched pretty quickly after we were ready to launch, I unfortunately didn't get much downtime to do all of the hiking trails and such (but on the plus side, I got to go home earlier).
If you ever get a chance to go (either as a scientist or, possibly more likely for many, as support staff), I highly recommend it.
Thanks for sharing
> France operates two stations in Antarctica: Dumont d’Urville Station, in Adelie Land, and the French-Italian joint Concordia Station.
Dumont d’Urville was built in 1956 on Petrel Island where it houses a maximum of 30 people in winter (about 100 in summer).
Concordia was built in 1997 and is operated year round since 2005. It can house 15 people in winter and 60 people in summer. The inland Concordia Station is re-supplied annually by three ground traverses leaving Cap Prudhomme Station, a small annex station of Dumont d’Urville. In addition, France operates three stations in the Sub-antarctic islands: Crozet, Kerguelen and Amsterdam Islands.
https://www.comnap.aq/Members/IPEV/SitePages/Home.aspx
Qualified IT personnel are in demand. If this is something you want to do and you apply yourself towards this goal, I'm sure it's quite achievable.
I went to Kerguelen island myself as a sysadmin (14 months, a winterover). I had the choice between Kerguelen, Crozet, New Amsterdam and Dumont d'Urville, I don't regret my choice at all even if Kerguelen lacks the special distinction of being on Antarctica.
The Polar Institute, IPEV, recruits about 10 or so IT-related personnel each year (though only two recruitments are for pure sysadmin types - Kerguelen and Dumont d'Urville) under a civilian service contract. It's worth trying it if you're less than 30.
Otherwise it's going to be difficult, and even more so for Concordia I'm afraid.
So there are a few spares remaining on the island (forbidden from shipping away anyway) but no legal way to keep operating once they are used up.
Since the employment would not be in the US, I'm guessing that no work visa would be required. If you are really interested, I think it would be worth your while to contact them.
It looks like they only hire Americans though (probably some requirement imposed on the contractor).
There are of course lots of other contractors for other sorts of jobs.
Mine: https://www.flickr.com/photos/beechlights/2739042419/in/phot...
Alternative, from the Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/earth/2515...
My photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/40423570@N07/35437050686/
Their photo: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fort+Armistead+Park/@39.20...
However, upon inspection I realized there were differences. It kind of blew my mind that someone had taken a picture of the same sunrise at the same time, from almost the same spot.
Depends on the spot. I'm sure that, on any given morning, there are probably shots taken in a place like Zabriskie Point that are effectively indistinguishable. (Of course, once there are moving objects in the frame, photos that look identical become much less likely.)
Not necessarily, but the the chance of any crazy coincidence happening and reaching HN homepage is quite big. Next time it might be two people with same name writing the exact same tweet independently. Or perhaps one guy winning the World Series of Poker two times in a row with the same winning hand.
When there's a million "kinds" of crazy coincidences, the chance of any one of them happening is much higher than chance of a specific one happening. This is kind of a selection bias, we only hear about the coincidences that happened.
The odds of the same person winning the WSOP now at all are significantly smaller as the fields have grown so much, never mind the compounding of winning it with the same hand twice :)
(To clarify, it was not the exact same hand - different suits in each case. But still pretty remarkable!)
And storms do not happen that often, even in places that have them "frequently", and they delimit the time, and even further by e.g. limitations such as whether the wind is too strong or the rain too heavy.
The number of locations they're likely to consider good spots to take the photo from for a given landmark may not be that great either. Both in terms of where you can actually see the landmark from, and in terms of other factors (e.g. in this case the article writer points out that both photographers had found places where they could protect themselves against some of the effects of the weather)
So that narrows locations and timeframe significantly.
Professional photographers are likely to take their time - the article writer mentions 40+ minutes of shots, and using bursts, further increasing the chance for an overlap within already relatively narrow time frames.
Additionally, external events that are the same for both (the waves) will give impulses to both with respect to when to shoot (though of course they might value different things, I'd argue people are more likely to shoot when something dramatic happens - e.g. if you have a dull day and suddenly something happens, you don't expect the pictures of that day to be evenly spaced afterwards).
I'm not saying we should expect it to happen all the time, but I also think it's easy to overestimate the number of possibilities because we've not tried to enumerate which ranges of values are actually likely.
Anyway, that low probability applies to every other photo. So, the first photo is compared to every other photo and by the end your talking ~50,000,000,000,000,000,000 comparisons. The odds would have to be mind boggling tiny for this not to happen all the time.
Another way of thinking about it, what are the odds that out of the ~1,000 photos taken of the same moment they are of the same subject? Now repeat that question 10 million times and the odds don't seem as low.
That they're professional photographers might reduce the odds by virtue of there being fewer of them, but might increase the odds by virtue of them being more likely to be the kind of people to know of specific spots to go out of their way to take pictures from during a storm, and more likely to value the same qualities i their shots, as well as more likely to publicize their photos enough for one of them to find the other persons photo.
While technically the world is discrete in space and time (planck length), for all intents and purposes it is infinite in practice.
[1] yes, there is countably infinite, but that doesn't work with the pigeon hole problem.
How does that not apply to this situation? The number of comparisons between photos is much much larger than the number of photos.
It might not apply in a way that is interesting mathematically, but I don't think that is what the other poster was getting at.
In other words, two photographs off by a planck length will generate the same set of pixels.
Working with images from multiple photographers cameras who haven't gone out of their way to sync the time beforehand, I've usually had to assume about a 10s time skew. They do not have precise clocks and are not sybchronized often.
Re-reading the article, I think saying the pics were shot at the "same millisecond" was just a colloquial expression to mean the look of the waves makes it look as if they were shot at the exact same time. They shared metadata but that seems to have been to share the other shooting parameters. I believe (and this would seem to confirm [1]) that EXIF timestamp data is only precise down to 1 second. added: and only as accurate as the photographer who set the date and time.
[1] https://www.media.mit.edu/pia/Research/deepview/exif.html
I looked at the large images. Gendon's appears to have been shot slightly earlier based on two differences. 1. The crest of the background wave at the left is horizontal in Gendon's photo and turning down from photo left to right in Risman's. 2. The trough in front of the breaking wave has reached the front of the light house in Gendon's photo exposing a sunlit rock at the lower left of the low circular structure.
A rock broke wave is most photogenic at the moment of maximum spray extent. The water is at lowest velocity and the gestalt shape is briefly frozen...then gravity dominates and the moment collapses. The shape of the spray is the second most stable element in the scene. While it is the defining photographic moment, it is not clock correlated down at the millisecond level.
If they were identical, there would be no 3d effect. My eyes can't figure out how to resolve the foreground waves, because the photographers were too far apart, but the spray wraps around the lighthouse as you would expect.
This makes "spot the difference" puzzles a triviality.
Which is, in itself a triviality, but an entertaining one.
I also recently discovered you can make plain-text stereograms:
O O O O O O O O O O O O O
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O O O O O O O O O O O O O
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O O O O O O O O O O O O OEdit: upon further inspection it turns out it was USB-C. Nevermind, all is right with the world :)
1. https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2388#comi...
Might help some other lost souls here :)
The side of your case that has the motherboard's backplate (where you plug everything in) is the bottom. On the vast majority of towers, the plate is on the right side, meaning left is up.
EDIT: right/left when looking at the front of the case.
https://www.fooducate.com/app#!page=product&id=B7329F0C-B3E6...
As usual I cut it in half straight down the middle. As usual I paid no attention to cutting it. I was just about to hand it to him when I noticed something strange, so I quickly took a photo...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8tjrwql37i7ujjn/muffin.jpg?dl=0
The chances of the cut aligning the way it did, the blueberries lining up the way they did, the cut cutting the blueberries exactly in half, the blueberries ending up in this exact formation, me buying this specific muffin, the rotation of the muffin when I cut it....
Well, it just seems impossibly unlikely for something like this to have happened, yet it did!
I think a millisecond is too strong of a claim, but it's almost certainly much less than 1/10th of a second. (a simple though experiment that you could turn into a real experiment if you have a camera: If you take a 1/10th second exposure of something like this the magnitude of the motion blur will be much greater than the differences between the wave shapes on the two cameras).
You'd expect in 100 burst of pictures taken like this for one to be taken at the same millisecond.
It's not that unlikely. What's more unlikely is that they selected the same shot and found out about it. This probably happens multiple times every day, just by virtue of the billions of people in the world taking a photo every day.
The foreground wave is definitely from a noticably different angle, but still the same scene, even the white caps in the far background look very different. You don't need a high res image for that, only, when cropped to the lighthouse only.
> Obviously not that realistic
Depends on how literally you want to take it. Lighthouses have definitely been photographed before. Photos depicting the man vs wild nature archetype too.
Some simple math: one camera was taking a photo every 143 milliseconds (roughly) and the other every 196 milliseconds (roughly). If both sit in burst mode continuously, I would expect these cameras to share the same millisecond (meaning each photograph took place within 1 millisecond of the other) every 28,000 milliseconds (roughly) or every 28 seconds.
I’d also argue that the details of this ‘unplanned’ event increased the likelihood that two photographers would select the same photo out of a series of bursts - didn’t the author say only about 3 images came out nice? Well, I imagine the other photographer had the same experience.
With the vast data capture exercise that is the internet, coincidences and patterns can be identified in near real time. Making sense of it all, however, is not so quick :-)
https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/03/Compare_with_ci...
This is not surprising considering we're comparing a 60D that was released in Aug 2010 and a 5D4 released 6 years later.
The turquoise tone in the waves has been overlayed (it's fake, in other words), and I bet other areas of the photo has been very heavily modified in an artificial way.
I would be curious though to read a professional analysis, since this is a very interesting (and I think rare) case of how a photo looks before and after fabric... I mean, after "art has been applied". /s
(Also, I wonder if Risman used a polarizing filter, while Gendron didn't, as it generally contributes to this type of difference (deeper blue tones, and increased resolution due to dehazing)).
Framing and timing the shot are some of the most important ones, and here they were almost exactly the same. But even at the time of shooting, given the same equipment, you'd have the choice of aperture, shutter speed, sensitivity (ISO). Also things like whether your lens is in the sun or the shade may affect the result tremendously. If you made these choices well, you have unspoiled data with a good dynamic range, and that allows all kinds of post-processing. And of course post-processing is an art in itself.
What I'm trying to say is, photography is more about skill than equipment. In the given situation there was a lot of light so even a relatively bad camera equipment would have sufficed.
https://jetholt.com/connected-minds/
I love things like this.
You both snapped a picture of the sky minutes apart on your way home because the sky looked nice. Okay, so what? There is nothing unusual about that. The photos are different. Clouds in different positions, different focal length... I don't see "connected minds". I see "hey, cool sky" [whips out smartphone, snaps photo].
I'm not a photographer. I don't claim to be. Maybe this event I experienced seems much more common for someone who describes themself with 'dev/design/photo/animation', but for me it seemed pretty unlikely. I don't take photos often (The last photo I took in my gallery of my smartphone is dated December 2017).
The crazy thing for me and my experience was how close in time the two images were (considering neither of us are photographers/regularly take photographs), and how you can match the patterns in the sky to estimate my position relative to hers. Something like this had never happened to me before.
One man's junk is another's treasure and all. :)
> I don't claim otherwise
You kind of did by making a web page called 'connected minds', saying "something crazy happened today", describing the photos as same clouds and "near identical", then sharing the link.
Be prepared for feedback when you do that! This isn't about me asserting myself as photographer in the room. We all carry cameras.
It sounds like you both live at same location, you were on way home, snapped photo of sky at similar times, as probably others in your neighborhood did. I'm not calling that "junk", I'm just not sure the claims you make equal the event! But let's move on.. all the best, take more photos! I checked out your homepage... Wow, now that is crazy! :)
It probably happens most days in the Louvre at the Mona Lisa. Although she doesn't move very much.
Grossly simplified, two humans went through dozens or hundreds of shots with identical internal “algorithm” and did the same work twice. This shows that the algorithm can be “abstracted away”, and the work can be done for them by the machine.
I can roughly see the counter-argument to be made, considering true creative self-expression and art losing value as its hardest aspect becomes optional (“natural selection” of produced work via artist’s taste)—but it’s hard to argue, in the light of this example, that professionals would find such a tool indispensable.
Well, obviously it does mean that; the photo was the optimal choice according to the two algorithms used by those photographers to choose their picture.
Does that mean it would also be selected by another equally good or superior algorithm? No. But it does necessarily mean that the photo is the optimal choice according to two algorithms.
At this lighthouse location, photographers are looking for that shot.. they wait for the wave, then shoot. There might only be a handful of images in the burst that qualify - perhaps less than 10, so the coincidence is not that amazing. It's cool, but not "scary freaky" coincidental.
Now if they were using a single shot camera, that would be more amazing.
Nevertheless, quite cool incident. Not just that they took a very similar photo, but also that they found out that they did.
With that background, it's apparent there should be enough parallax, even given the long distance to the subject due to the claimed distance between photographers to create a stereo pair using the two images (some photographers make hyper-stereo images of mountains and clouds). If one image were derived from the other, it should be obvious -- the differences between the images would only be skin deep, e.g. the waves in the foreground, the different position of the bars at the top of the tower, but the entire body of the wave would be identical.
Overlaying them and subtracting the difference, it can be seen that there are slight variations across the entire image, and when viewed as a stereo pair, there is an obvious stereo effect, the platform in front of the tower appears in space in front, the wave appears to wrap around the tower.
What we're left with is the story that these two photographers didn't coordinate their images. I see no reason to disbelieve this. Like was stated elsewhere in this thread, the title is incorrect and the images weren't taken the same millisecond, so that makes the story less remarkable.
That’s the funnest thing about this story imo. These kinds of photographers shoots hundreds or thousands of photos in half an hour. It’s wild they were both struck by one particular exposure.
https://sib.smugmug.com/Sports/Baseball/SEA-DET/i-jhrMkC3/A
This is a picture that I took in 2009; you can see the ball coming off Ken Griffey's bat after breaking it.
A major league fastball comes off the bat at 100+ miles per hour (45 m / s). The shutter speed was 1/640s (about 1.5 msec). The ball is about 7.26 cm in diameter.
And also why I was shooting with single shots to try to time the ball close to the bat. Given a camera that took about 5 frames per second (200msec between frames), the ball would move about 29 feet (8.8m) in between frames.
The breaking bat was a nice surprise.
I know it's nit-picking, but why make that the title?
Otherwise, it's also definitely worth noting that these were shot with burst mode, so that the chance of this happening is ~.7% --- definitely very unlikely, but still much more likely than most rare events you read about in the news.
Also the scenario described here is not that rare.. Once you have two photogs there that day, your chances of getting the same shot is already pertty good. The two photographers were essentially firing off continuous shots when they anticipate a wave hitting... Everyone was focused on the lighthouse...
This also brings to mind the image of paparazzi or sports photographers all in a narrow press area rapidly shooting off pictures. I don't think any of them have had trouble selling their photographs to agencies despite being in the same location and capturing the same subject simultaneously.
[0]: Kogan, Terry S., "How Photographs Infringe" (2017). Utah Law Faculty Scholarship. 20. https://dc.law.utah.edu/scholarship/20
Both photographers take multiple shots with a short shutter, usually from the same places, and usually trying to pick the same events. So the only coincidence is basically having two photographers be at the same place and time.
In this example, there were discernible differences, but what if the differences were below our level (or care) to discern them?
This was the next Tuesday of the photography world.
Shopping cart added.
This assumes that both photos were not edited.
It's why we exist at all.
I could already tell that from the shift of the white caps on the waves midway in the ocean
its technically possible to plan, but just as likely to happen on accident. And its definitely a wonderful example why the idea of intellectual property for photographs is a flawed concept.
But its not an easy topic and photographers still need to earn their living. That means some protection from publishers that just take their shots without paying.
You have to maintain a basic level of trust in the source of information if you're going to have any interesting thoughts about it. Finding actual evidence of fakery would be worthwhile, or checking some features and reporting how you found none would be too. But there's no value suggesting it just because you feel cynical.