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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Regarding photos:

People our age only have a few childhood pictures, and they are warped by time on analog media. Those pictures of us as a kid look really old because they are naturally filtered. Soon people will wonder WTF old-pic filters are for, and some historian will have to explain why it's blurred and the colors are faded. Also why did people have clothes for each decade?

Our kids, by contrast, have had pictures taken of them every week at least. With metadata so you know where you were. And they're digital images that won't fade. When our kids are 40, they can look at an archive of how they looked pretty much every week of their lives. Not only that, they can already search the archive for particular situations.

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> "Our kids, by contrast, have had pictures taken of them every week at least. With metadata so you know where you were. And they're digital images that won't fade"

They might still wonder "Why only 8K resolution?! Why aren't they in 3D and interactive?!"

I think years from now people looking at old photos will marvel at the high resolution for such old pictures. Starting around 1999 they'll see fuzzy 1.2 MP digital pictures, but then over the next ten years picture quality improves and teh amount of pictures increases. So from 1999 to about 2009 will be the "fuzzy ages".

This seems at least somewhat cultural. My family was big on photo albums so nearly everything had at least a cheap disposable camera picture taken. It wasn't to the extent it is now but you still got multiple pictures per year for birthdays, holidays, school awards, extracurriculars like ymca sports, etc.

Yes, my grandmother has photo albums of all her grandchildren that she likes to bring out when we go to visit.

And because you only have a few rare childhood photos I expect you value them highly. The next generation, who will inherit thousands of photos of themselves and their lives, will feel no rarity or shortage, and probably won’t value them as much.

Google uses AI to pick out the highlights from the junk. Loads of factors to use like the geotag to show this looks like a holiday, this is a photo at the beach vs this is a boring photo of a desk.

So there is a load of data but ever improving AI will get better at showing you the cool stuff.

It's already at the point where you have to spend lots of time to manually make them rare (pare them down to no more than a hundred or two per year, max) or rely on ML to generate highlights for you, for things like photos of kids.

Google photos does a great job of this. They assemble albums of "This is what you were doing this week 6 years ago". They are pretty cool and a regular source of "oh wow I remember that"

> And they're digital images that won't fade.

They might not fade, but they are augmented by noise filtering algorithms, HDR and other tech that still subtly affects the picture quality and perception.

This is so true for me, only had yearlies and occasional family events. It’s really cool to be able to look back through the years of pics I’ve taken of my kids.

Looking back, I wish everyone had taken pictures of everyday life (probably with an Instamatic). Christmas pictures, awards, meh. What I really want are pictures of the halls in high school, street racing, parties with giant bonfires and beer.

One thing I noticed when looking through my parents' (pre-digital) home videos and photos from my childhood is that 90% of the subjects are me, and 10% anyone else, while what I want to see is the inverse of that. I want to see everyone else, mostly.

I try to keep that in mind when snapping photos or taking videos of my kids, and pan over to the oldsters in the room from time to time, even if all I want is to record the kids.

> What I really want are pictures of the halls in high school, street racing, parties with giant bonfires and beer.

Can confirm that a couple really, really long shots with the camera rolling for no particular purpose and capturing normal stuff happening (mostly just the audio) were among the best parts of the home videos, IMO.

Nobody ever takes pictures of normal things. If you just looked at photos you'd think all my male ancestors ever did was fell trees and pour concrete and all the women ever did was hang out together drinking coffee and smoking.

The play _Our Town_ addresses this a little: given the chance to go back and relive any day, you should choose an unremarkable day vs a momentous one.

I feel like the optimal living-documenting ratio was right before the advent of digital cameras: photography was accessible enough, but there was enough disconnect between the event and the record to be present. Now it's much easier to live through the phone's what-you-see-is-what-you-get viewfinder [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697921

Related to this: it worries me that on vacation it seems my relationship with sight seeing is mainly through the phone's camera. I'm constantly seeing opportunities to take pretty snapshots, I worry that people "get in the way", I wonder about the sun messing with my photo...

...and in the end I forget to enjoy the view. Before digital cameras and mobile phones, I would just marvel at the view and enjoy it. Now I only really see it when I'm back home, flipping through digital photos (and sometimes not even that, how many photos we take that we never look at again?).

I like making photos of landscapes as a hobby. I have a big dSLR camera, nice digital p&s, and my phone. Every time I go out (eg. on a hike) I have to force myself to consider if this is a "photo trip" or a "leisure trip". Am I going to be switched on, take a ton of gear, and be trying to make photos? Or am I going worry less about it, try to enjoy the moment and maybe grab a few non critical snapshots with whatever I have (usually just phone).

Even when going someplace new as a tourist, it's tempting to worry too much about photos. If I really want to play the aspiring travelling landscape photographer it would be work, a lot of it.

With a modern phone camera, for the purpose of a "I was here, I did/saw this" snapshot for posterity, it's pretty hard to mess up a photo so bad that it is worthless as long as it's pointed in the right direction. Take a few shots, but don't worry too much about quality or quantity.

There's been some studies on the effects of this which have been mixed for-or-against [1-3].

I do a lot of photography and this is a conundrum that many in my circle are aware of. My solutions:

- Use a (pseudo)rangefinder camera like a Leica or Fujifilm X100/X-Pro with an optical viewfinder. Even pre-digital SLRs would subject you to, in the moment of photographing, looking at the photograph. With an uncoupled optical viewfinder, you look at life [4]. While the photograph is a powerful simulacrum, it is not life itself; the wall-sized print of the sunrise from the top of Mt. Fuji that hangs in my living room is merely a visual paraphrase of the experience.

- Shooting film and the friction that goes into handling, developing, scanning, and (hopefully, eventually) printing brings some of the Benjaminian aura back to the visual record [5].

- Reading about Japanese aesthetics, specifically the notions of imperfections and impermanence, has helped me be more present and aware of the transience of the moment [6].

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976135044...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22113...

[3] https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/74825

[4] https://youtu.be/kueqi8A3LQc?t=254

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...

[6] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/911856.A_Tractate_on_Jap...

There were people like this before digital cameras. My father was one of them with his Canon A-1 SLR.

Agreed! But before phones, taking a camera and gear with you was so much trouble you often decided against it. Now taking a phone with you it's the default, and this makes taking photos frictionless, which brings me back to my original point.

This is a problem for historians as well. What you want to figure out is how average people lived, but all the historical texts that survived describe the feats and feasts of the 1%.

As a high school yearbook editor and photo editor in college I think you got a lot of fairly day to day photos. You don't get that in the professional sphere as companies (probably even today) aren't that big on random photos of the workplace.

I have a deliberately created Year in the Life type book from a company I used to work for that was made a couple of years before I joined the company. But it's a very atypical work.

If you haven’t seen it, you might really enjoy this project. Someone once took a polaroid every day for nearly 20 years.

https://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/

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