The Claude Glass Changed the Way People Saw Landscapes | Hacker News Reader

The Claude Glass Changed the Way People Saw Landscapes

daily.jstor.org

52 pointsHooke13 comments

I first heard about Claude Glass while reading "Landmarks"[0] by Robert Macfarlane. While Claude Glass was only briefly mentioned, "Landmarks" itself is one of those wonderfully deep books that invites slow reading. The richness of nature language (that we seem to be losing) has been rewarding for me to explore through Macarlane's experience. I paid attention to nature before, but since starting to read "Landmarks" I have more regularly zoomed in on details and how features of the landscape vary subtly from place to place.

[0] - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/536563/landmarks-by...

Edit: Fixed author's first name. Thanks @zzleeper!

*Robert Macfarlane. For a second I thought John had added being an accomplished writer as a side gig to philosophy and coding

> On the face of it, it’s a somewhat absurd concept. Imagine tourists flocking to a famous beauty spot, only to turn around and fix their eyes on its reflection in a tiny dark mirror.

Every single tourist spot on the planet is filled with people looking at the objects of interest before them through a smartphone. I'm surprised the article does not make that parallel.

At least with the smartphone, you're taking a picture you can look at later, and share with friends.

It does seem odd living your life though the lens of expecting it to be future. But it really highlights the oddity of sightseeing at all: what's the point of going to look at a thing? OK, it's the Eiffel Tower, or kudus at the zoo. And... now what?

Perhaps the greatest example of this is the Mona Lisa. You go to see a painting that you've seen a thousand times before, and seen more clearly. What else are you going to do but grab proof that you actually did it?

I've been in places that were unutterably beautiful or heart-wrenchingly meaningful. One of my most treasured photos is a piece of cave art that moved me to tears... though I couldn't get a good photo in the darkness. My photo is of a postcard in the gift shop. (I was backpacking and didn't want to carry stuff, but I did make a donation.)

That kind of thing easily becomes habit. "I took a picture of the meaningful thing, so maybe if I take a picture of this the meaning of the experience will become clear later". Tourism often leaves me feeling like I missed something. I've tried to get better at it, both by letting myself feel nothing when the site turns out to be unimportant to me, and by looking for things I didn't expect.

A physical manifestation of Instagram filters!

That’s what it sounds like, but also just useful to look at and paint:

https://www.waikereru.org/assets/images/news/claude-glass.jp...

This makes me think of circular polarizers, and the effect they have on skies and landscapes, which is well-known to photographers but perhaps not to the general public:

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/uk/tutorials/use-a-polari...

I wonder if this is something that could be incorporated into smartphone cameras quite easily.

> I wonder if this is something that could be incorporated into smartphone cameras quite easily.

I imagine it'd be straightforward to put a circular polarizer in front of a smartphone camera lens. But people might not like the 1-1.5 stops of light lost because of how it would affect/limit low-light photography. I suspect the latter is more important to most people than the effect of a polarizer on sky color in a photo.

I believe modern smartphones auto bracket on time and exposure and just AI adjust. I know most of my friends with modern cameras take ridiculously beautiful photos as a matter of routine.

First recorded use of AR.

Some photos of large Claude mirrors and information: https://frogenddweller.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/claude-glass...

A similar technique used by painters is to squint really hard at something so that the subject is reduced to its most basic parts

Reply on news.ycombinator.com