Photography technology has influenced what people consider a good picture
collectorsweekly.com
collectorsweekly.com
"The less you have, the more creative you have to become."
In On Photography, Susan Sontag argued that photography, which itself took a while to become considered an art form, gradually began to absolve painting of its duty to represent 'reality.' I can see 'phonetography' doing the same: dedicated photojournalists with dedicated cameras are losing ground to amateurs with just a phone and social media account.
Painting didn't die and neither will photography, but it's definitely going through some sort of midlife existential crisis. I can see it doing the equivalent of buying a vintage roadster as a senior citizen, i.e. return to its youthful state (film and mechanical/chemical processes) and explore its own unturned stones.
I guess the experience of only having 24 pictures and developing becomes meaningful/ interesting when you are used to unlimited and direct.
Funny you should put it this way, because it’s the same crowd buying both: wealthy old guys. Some time around the 1990s, Canon and Nikon made the fateful decision that photography would become stupid expensive and accessible only to those with money to burn. Don’t get me wrong, modern DSLRs and AF lenses are amazing feats of engineering and manufacturing, but the end result has been that “serious” photographers spend upwards of $10k on a nice body and not that much glass. You reap what you sow. All of the energy and excitement about taking pictures now surrounds phones. The idea of dropping $thousands on a “proper” DSLR setup probably seems laughable to most millennials and gen Z.
There are physical limitations we're already bumping into. A lens can only have a limited resolution. It's pointless to make a sensor that's got more pixels than the lens can produce. The amount of light coming in is limited, and the sensor can't gather more than 100% the light.
A sensor has a quantum efficiency stat, which tells you how likely is it that a photon will turn into an electron and be measured, and IIRC it already hovers at around 50% for most cameras, which means at the very best you can gather twice the amount of light before running into a wall. In photographic terms that means a maximum improvement of one f-stop.
An improvement that still could be had is a good Sigma Foveon-style sensor with stacked sensors. This in the ideal case would give you two extra f-stops (due to the lack of a bayer filter), and improve color accuracy. Foveon still doesn't perform well enough on ISO to compete well though.
So at this point we can make near perfect glass and near perfect sensors. What's left is basically playing around with the tradeoffs -- do you want to sacrifice resolution for bit depth, or bit depth for resolution? How about medium and large format? This by the way means that a big dedicated camera will always be better than a phone because it will have a bigger lens and a bigger sensor, and can do the same software tricks the phone can.
Maybe phones will become a new arbitrary standard like 135 film was. Modern APS-C sensors and larger will be dubbed 'Large Format,' something of interest only to enthusiasts but meaningless to the average consumer.
But, "APS-C" won't become known as "large format". Those terms are already in use in photography and already hold specific meanings, even if there's some wiggle room. Micro four thirds is the smallest serious size, still far bigger than what a cell phone can have, APS-C is the consumer DSLR size, full frame matches the size of 35mm film, and it goes further to medium format and large format. Medium format is already quite specialized at starts at $5K, and large format is extremely specialized territory and not for normal people.
One of my favorite books is Jerry Hsu's The Beautiful Flower is the World, a collection of phone pictures brilliantly juxtaposed to tragicomedic effect [1]. NYC street photo grandmaster Jeff Mermelstein now only uses his phone, to take pictures of other peoples' phones [2]. It's an interesting parabolic trajectory where the 'better' you get, the 'worse' your equipment can be, almost like how 'bad' fashion is an ironic indicator of 'good' fashion sense.
[1] https://www.fstopmagazine.com/blog/2019/09/book-review-the-b...
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-photograph...
With advancements in digital photography and recently computational exposure all of this is gone. Over-saturation, Hyper contrast, HDRI corrections are the norm. People like things that are easy to understand and reproduce.
The next level of madness is GAS. There are thousands of "photographers" who are actually Technographers. Who are part of some "group" or brand tribe. And the taste of the tribe defines success.
The people who are learning composition, exposure or development are minority. And in this age of popularity contest photography is measured in likes, so there is no place for good photography in a classical sense. People have phones with AI and everybody is an "artist'. So be it.
But some of us don't care. Some of us shoot film for experience and challenge. Some of us read Ansel Adams books and try to create meaningful work. Some of us know who is Bresson, Robert Capa, and countless other masters. https://www.magnumphotos.com/shop/photographers/ And this is not bad thing.
Let people like what they can comprehend.
The Venn Diagram of where the two meet is not that big.
For me "Technographers" are not people who are on the technical side of photography. Real technical side is important from craftsmanship perspective, but only as a tool with photography goal.
"Tecnographers" are people who care only for cameras and photographic gear in general. They follow marketing gurus and camera reviews and participate in brand defined groups. They are obsessed with "latest tech" and "showing off" in "Photography competitions" or "Group Meetings". They are the most effective customers for manufacturers and in general are miles away from photography as an artistic expression or even craftsmanship.
https://flashbak.com/photographs-by-the-perverted-flaneur-mi...
verfremdungseffekt = distancing effect, something devised to cause you to not identify on an emotional level with the subjects or the action in the scene, but to see the image from a more dispassionate intellectual perspective. Magritte was mentioned because his work often "breaks the fourth wall," directly addressing the viewer instead of the more traditional painterly approach of creating drama in the scene.
non-diegetic content = content which is not part of the world of the scene itself. The scratches on the photos aren't part of the world that the subjects live in.
Or is this some commentary on the futility of the discourse, and postmodern discourse is just a performance art?
I guess its a little unsurprising coming from the usual HN crowd lmao.
Yes.
"Tichy was frequently arrested for hanging around the local pool and snapping pictures of unsuspecting women."
https://www.howardgreenberg.com/artists/miroslav-tich
Though he seems to have made quite a lot of effort in the handmade cameras and deliberate processing techniques.
1. People who like realism, photoshopped pictures, GGI in media, etc.
vs.
2. Modern art, film noir, Black & white classical movies, etc.
If you give the second a chance, you might be suprised what your imagination does. I used to be kinda a #1 guy with the exception of bad action filmed CGI movies, but completely changed as the years went by. I've even gotten to the point where I think color in film has ruined a lot of movies, along with digital.
I don’t see myself in either category, at the same time that I do remember appreciating things that would fit both.
I could understand if they evoked some kind of emotions or served as a deconstruction of photography technique, but most of them just look like deliberately bad photographs to me.
Then again, I'm only an amateur at photography.
Contrasting with galleries, museums, private exhibitions surviving off subsidies or entrance fees—and I don’t think it’s as simple as “it’s just a new way of viewing that you don’t like because it’s new”—what we have settled for are “free” ad-supported platforms that are in effect much closer to casinos and malls, and to which convincing a visitor to not leave directly equals revenue.
There is, of course, this flip side, where presenting any visually unoriginal, self-gratifying, etc. work in context of an exhibition gives it not-necessarily-deserved value; and it could be that the ability to make the viewer feel something you want them to feel despite all that widely varying context is a valid skill.
I just think art is poorly defined.
That's an effect of perspective. Knowing the fact that the "home made" appearance is deliberate changes the photos from being random bad photos to being commentary.
These say interpretive art to me more than every pixel of yet another nature shot, or airbrushed person. They make my imagination curious about the world within.
When all the details are there just as they would be outside, why not just go outside?
There is not one kind of art.
Art does not need to be popular or broadly understood to be art.
You are not a majority anyway.
Good taste, feeling, and emotions are personal.
I suppose, as they say, there really is no accounting for taste. My own included, of course.
Here's a couple that I don't actually mind too much, but still not my cup of tea.
https://www.artsy.net/artist/misaki-kawai/works-for-sale https://www.artsy.net/artist/maja-djordjevic/works-for-sale
https://www.streetartbln.com/blu-murals-painted-over/
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/cuvry-brache-in-berlin-...
... but I actually like them. I wish I could explain why; he's doing some clever stuff here. Some of it is kinda pervy and it feels like TMI, but he's at least being clever. There are a few photos that feel like you are voyeuristically peeking through time, the defects in the photos are like peeking through bushes to see something interesting. But mostly I can't explain why I like it. I just do.
A good photo looks interesting or has something interesting in it or comes with some interesting context.
These are more or less random photos taken with a bad camera. That's it.
Now, I don't say you need good camera for good photos. You can make interesting photos with any camera. And you can also use bad camera for interesting effect.
But, again, these photos don't show any kind of plan, thought, deliberation, interesting subject, context, technique, nothing.
Knowing the context and the work he must have put into building the camera, maintaining it and later developing his shots under the circumstances he worked with also helps. What I definitely don't see here is just a bunch of bad photos taken with a bad camera. I'd hardly call a homemade camera as simply bad, even imperfect it merits some respect.
I'd say they at least fit Susan Sontag's loose definition of photography showing others something novel.
To my eye, these photos have all three of those things.
You don't have to like them yourself, but it seems a bit much to imply that they are objectively without value as art.
There is nothing objective about art anyway.
I agree with you, though. There is something in these. Some kind of motion. Some kind of primitive, wild instincts as well. As if a bear had found a camera, and he were more interested by ladies than about anything else.
I mean... I don't know if I'd take perfect pictures with such equipment, especially not if I'm trying to do it secretly.
The photos are typical of Juergen's style. But his style has been evolving more into casual snapshot aesthetic, but in more ironic way.
High fashion is always copying what the regular unfashionable people on the street are wearing, in the eternal search for authenticity.
Which is why things like bubble jackets, sweat pants, crocs and dad sneakers evolved from being laughed at to being very fashionable.
That's kind of what fashionable means.
Oxford dict:
Fashionable - characteristic of, influenced by, or representing a current popular style
I kinda like this Cambridges definition[1] of fashionable more (even if isn't perfect)
> wearing clothes, doing things, and going to places that are considered stylish
There is clear difference of what is considered stylish and what is popular.
Macmillian[2] has even more poignant definition available:
> popular with rich and successful people, and often expensive
Which I might disagree on specifics, but it still carries the thought over. Fashionable is not (necessarily, or even commonly) popular with the common people, but of some sort of elite.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fashiona...
[2] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/fashi...
A lot of what is "popular" is still recognized by the wearer themselves as not fashionable, and is worn despite that (and sometimes because of that) for various reasons.
P.S. class aside, nylon is a bad choice to wear on an airplane. It melts into your skin. Cotton and leather are good choices if you want to survive an accident. Also decent lace up shoes can save your life if you need to exit a burning airplane. Try running over burning wreckage with flip-flops.
I take off my shoes for comfort when at altitude, but lace them up for takeoff and landing.
Other than that, this looks like someone with a smartphone trying a little too hard to "do photography" yet not bothering to travel to a nicer venue.
To check out a good example for a movie, watch The Frighteners of doing traditional close ups with wide angles. This allows for normal framing of your talent while giving lots of room in the frame for the background gags.
In terms of which focal lengths produce perspectives that make the most sense to our eyes, people usually point towards 35-50mm lenses. Supposedly the formula is something like "focal length = diagonal measurement of the format".
Look through a "normal" lens (~42mm equiv) and you'll realize that it's actually nowhere near our field of vision (FOV), peripheral included. What a normal lens does is take a very narrow slice of our FOV and represent it neatly and proportionally, i.e. given two similarly framed portraits, a 40mm would make your nose look "normal" whereas a 28mm would make it look larger [1]. The shorter focal length dramatizes while also being closer to what we actually see; this wide perspective is why the two most venerable "street" cameras, the Ricoh GR and Leica Q, have fixed 28mm lenses.
[1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/1/17059566/pla...
However, these lenses will obviously not produce a human field of view. In fact, AFAIK, you cannot reproduce the field of view of a human eye without pretty severe distortions. Your eyes aren't rectilinear, so using very short rectilinear lenses don't really get you any closer to how a human sees. This choice is therefor aesthetic.
Shooting wide-angle in color is aesthetically and objectively closer to what we (typically) see than a black-and-white telephoto picture.
I agree about color, but not focal length. Using very short focal lengths introduces highly distracting distortions. "Normal" focal lengths (35-50mm) are closer to what we experience, despite not having the wide field of view.
In order for such short focal lengths to truly be representative of human vision, you'd have to abandon rectilinear optics and flat media; and you'd have to graduate the level of detail such that most of the resolution was concentrated in the center rather than the periphery. If you're not willing to do so, a "normal" focal length reproducing the central vision will always be truer to human vision due to having a more reasonable perspective.
Our attention and peripheral vision come into play also in how we consume a photograph. You will employ your peripheral vision less when you view images on your phone compared to a wall-sized print. Additionally, the longer the focal length, the more prescriptive the effect; the photographer and photograph are telling you what to look at. Wide lenses invite the photographer to work with juxtaposition and layering, and the viewer to selectively attend to different elements, which is actually in agreement with your closer-to-experience angle, i.e. the viewer must decide where to focus their cone of attention in a wide-angle photograph, just like they would in real life.
Again, I am not dealing with an absolute capital-T True representation of human vision. We are constrained to modern optical formulae and 2D mediums of commercially available photographic equipment. You could snowball this all the way into stereoscopic 3D fisheye videos livestreamed from eyewear, to get even closer to True human vision.
I still maintain that wide lenses are so useful and popular for documentary and snapshot purposes because they record more of the elements we once and will attend to; a more convincing simulacrum. It's no coincidence that 35mm and 28mm and wider are used by so many photojournalists and street/documentary photographers, often exclusively in the latter case.
[1] https://petapixel.com/2016/08/01/laowa-12mm-f2-8-widest-f2-8...
[2] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1089935-REG/rokinon_1...
If you're using flat media and rectilinear optics, shorter lenses get progressively less and less representative of human vision.
> the photographer and photograph are telling you what to look at.
This is always true at every focal length. Your choice of composition informs the viewer whether it's a wide angle shot or super-telephoto.
> ...wide lenses are so useful and popular for documentary and snapshot purposes because they record more of the elements...
Shorter lenses do incorporate more into the image. That doesn't make them more or less representative of human vision.
Below ~12mm, yes. 28mm is still a compromise between field of view and usability; even with a 21mm, I have to be right in front of someone for them to fill the frame, because I would have to do the same if I were looking at them with my own eyes.
> This is always true at every focal length. Your choice of composition informs the viewer whether it's a wide angle shot or super-telephoto.
"Lately I’ve been struck with how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph." - Diane Arbus.
Photography, with its receptiveness to stream-of-conscious approach and synchronous rearing with postmodernism, is an inherently subjective medium. Joel Meyerowitz, on his use of wide angle lenses, terms the explicit look-at-this approach as 'collecting' [1]. There are subgenres dedicated to not collecting, introducing ambiguity that invites the viewer to form their own interpretation of the recorded reality.
I took a walk this afternoon and looked at a tree ~5m away. I could visualize framing the trunk of the tree with a 50 or 75mm, but also noticed a child running towards the tree. The childless telephoto perspective would've been a more accurate representation of my subjective experience of focusing on the tree, but an objectively less accurate representation of what I was actually seeing in my field of vision. A tree-only photo tells you to look at the tree, whereas a wider perspective invites you to consider the relationship between the disparate elements. Meyerowitz also waxes poetically about this [ibid].
Again, the Ricoh GR and Leica Q, the most popular dedicated street/documentary cameras, have 28mm lenses, and the Fujifilm X100 a 35mm. Essentially all of the street photographers I've met internationally use either a 28mm or 35mm most of the time. There is a visceral you-are-right-there-in-the-moment feeling from looking at a wide angle photograph, especially when printed large, that simply cannot be reproduced with a normal-telephoto.
Which is what I'm saying. It's a compromise, rather than trying to match human vision.
> "Lately I’ve been struck with how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph." - Diane Arbus.
There is no focal length that doesn't involve a choice about what the viewer can see.
There's always composition. You're always making a choice.
Once you get to a certain level, you can begin to make choices that invites the viewer to make a choice, and realize that your choices are only ever second to theirs. Wider lenses are more effective at this specifically because they gather more elements in the frame, inducing more ambiguity and opportunity for alternative interpretations, just like how we always have to decide where our cone of attention points.
Stopping short of advising you to touch grass, I'd invite you to shoot exclusively with wides and fisheyes for a while, and practice soft focus for peripheral awareness [1]. Apart from that, no argumentation on photography through the limited medium of text is going to reconcile our perspectives.
[1] https://www.victoriastellatoskeet.com/blog/at-home-eye-exerc...
Subjects regularly look much further from the camera than they actually are. Objects at the edge of the frame are weirdly stretched. Whatever is closest to the camera will appear disproportionately large in your final image. Objects in the background are disproportionately small.
Not to mention barrel distortions tend to be much more prominent as focal length is shortened.
Normal focal lengths are the closest to human vision. Wide angle fisheye lenses could be ok with curved media, but otherwise they're just warped.
Considering the area of focus of human vision, along with the fact that we don't see in rectilinear terms, trying to reduce all the aspects of human vision to one factor: field of view... seems foolish at best.
If we viewed photos in some kind of spherical VR space or on curved media, then wider field of view with a fisheye lens could be argued to be more similar to human vision. However, we almost exclusively view pictures as flat sheets of paper or flat rectangular screens.
For those reasons and others, 35-50mm is far more similar to actual human vision.
https://petapixel.com/2012/11/17/the-camera-versus-the-human...
Composition (and thus the number of elements in frame) is a choice that gets made by the photographer, and can be achieved by altering the scene, changing distance, or changing focal length. Having more or fewer elements in frame has nothing to do with mimicking human vision, and whatever focal length you've chosen is a decision you're making for the viewer. If you make a 360° photo, that's still a composition decision you're making on behalf of the viewer, and it directly effects how they consume your work.
Now, if you want your image to be a wider angle, that's fine. That is a legitimate compositional choice... but it is a choice that you the photographer are making. It's not better or worse. Nor is trying to be "closer to human vision" inherently better or worse than any other choice. Knock yourself out with whatever focal lengths suit you.
If you can cherrypick to distortion, I can cherry pick to compositional element-gathering ability, of which a wide field of view is objectively better at, and which is actually more important to documentation-oriented photographers. To revisit the impetus for this conversation:
>Some photographers feel the shorter focal lengths feel "more authentic" somehow.
>Considering the area of focus of human vision, along with the fact that we don't see in rectilinear terms, trying to reduce all the aspects of human vision to one factor: field of view... seems foolish at best.
The wideness is precisely why practiced documentary photographers/photojournalists choose 28-35mm for their more authentic representation; it is a better representation of the messiness of the world that takes a trained eye to organize. Empirically and experientially, experienced portrait photographers will use normals and telephotos for pleasing-yet-detached proportions, and experienced street/snapshot photographers will continue using wides for the authentic drop-the-viewer-in-the-world effect. To say that they should actually be using 50mm is... foolish at best. When someone pays me for portraits, I will use a 50-75mm, but when I want to remember what it was like to be somewhere doing something and living, I and many others will use a 28mm or 35mm.
I will now go photograph grass with a 28mm and you should too.
I'm cherrypicking to perspective. Distortion is an additional argument, alongside field of view of the area of focus, etc.
> documentary photographers/photojournalists choose 28-35mm for their more authentic representation
I dispute the idea that there is anything like a uniformity of choices, and I dispute the idea that documentary photographers choose a focal length for authenticity purposes. If you're doing a documentary and especially if you're doing photojournalism, you're choosing focal lengths that properly frame your subject at whatever distance you need to stand at... because often you won't be able to choose your distance to the subject.
This fstoppers article suggests that the two most useful photojournalism lenses are a 24-70mm zoom, and an 85mm portrait lens.
https://fstoppers.com/originals/two-most-useful-lenses-photo...
Other articles seem to suggest that photojournalists should carry zoom lenses covering a range from 12 or 16mm to 200mm, which makes perfect sense.
I see no indication that 28-35mm is preferred.
> To say that they should actually be using 50mm is... foolish at best.
Then don't say that. What does this statement have to do with this conversation?
> When someone pays me for portraits, I will use a 50-75mm, but when I want to remember what it was like to be somewhere doing something and living, I and many others will use a 28mm or 35mm.
And that's fine. You can use whatever focal lengths you want to evoke different emotions. That's one of the reasons we don't just use one lens or one focal length all the time.
This isn't really relevant to the assertion that short focal lengths are somehow closer to human vision.
Documentation: the act or an instance of furnishing or authenticating with documents [Merriam-Webster]. Documentary photographers are thus by definition chiefly concerned with representing events as authentically as they happened.
I've done several years of work as a photojournalist [1-3]. Of the other photojournalists I've bumped into, the wide-normal zoom or a 24/28mm prime gets used most of the time. Barring logistical mandates, only amateurs aren't able to choose their distance to the subject and rely solely on telephotos; more experienced PJs know how to get close. “If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough” - Robert Capa.
I also do a lot of personal street/documentary work and have shot around prominent photo circles in Japan and New York [4,5]. As I've said repeatedly, the most popular cameras in this genre (Ricoh GR, Leica Q, Fuji X100) sport fixed, i.e. unchangeable, 28mm or 35mm lenses. Many of those who shoot on Leicas, whose system lenses are so expensive you can only have a few, often choose either a 28mm or 35mm. It's a running joke within New York specifically that you don't shoot street unless it's with a Leica M6 and 28mm.
> Then don't say that. What does this statement have to do with this conversation?
With regards to documentary photography, which is trying to portray things as authentically as they happen, by your standards, normal lenses would be the principle option because of the distortionless proportional perspective, but this is empirically not the case.
I think we're on different levels of experience here, and I will sign off this conversation as I advise again: go photograph grass with a 28mm.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/CHS-DHPHV8c/
[2] https://www.instagram.com/p/CHVdZ0SHuI2/
[3] https://www.instagram.com/p/CBBK85GnVPA/
Not relevant to the discussion.
> I've done several years of work as a photojournalist [1-3]
This is an anecdote, and even if accepted it doesn't do anything show uniformity.
You have chosen short focal lengths. That's fine.
> With regards to documentary photography, which is trying to portray things as authentically as they happen, by your standards, normal lenses would be the principle option because of the distortionless proportional perspective, but this is empirically not the case.
That is not my standard.
You're right, if you post these anonymously to IG, no one would bat an eye. But it's published in a prominent fashion magazine, it's taken by the famous Juregen Teller, it features celebrities posing in an unflattering way, they're wearing the latest designer clothes, and it got a ton of negative attention on Twitter and other social media (all attention is good attention).
A typical amateur won't be able to do that (they probably think they can). I consider his style to be real and "amateurish" in a deliberate way. In some ways, I feel he's parodying amateur photos and putting famous celebrities in situations that normal pros don't usually would or can. Here is another site that tries to describe it: https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/juergen-teller-w-magazine/
I'm also not one to critique photos from a technical perspective, and tend to go by feel in my own and others photos.
When I was more serious into photography back in the day, getting a photo that can express what I wanted it to feel or the story I wanted to convey was much harder.
The rich or famous can cosplay poverty, but the people in between can't, for fear of being mistaken as poor.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
There are some people that stretch the art of photography, but they are more digital artists than photographers. They take a lot of the creativity into the post-processing and Photoshop stage. Most professional photography these days is just right-place-right-time and tweaking in Lightroom.
I'm thinking specifically of Ansel Adams, who famously said “You don't take a photograph, you make it.”
Of course darkroom tools had to be supplemented with special techniques and filters applied at the time of exposure. Digital photography is orders of magnitude easier.
The hard thing about digital photography is that it's easier, but that means you have to be that much better to stand out, because it's easier for everyone.
Good pun.
The fixer stabilises the image, removing the unexposed silver halide remaining on the photographic film or photographic paper, leaving behind the reduced metallic silver that forms the image
That could mean "this image is an example of a selfie" (which is false). Alternatively it could mean "this image shows an example of a selfie being taken" (which is true).
Something like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cmwov/_/c0tpyls/
EDIT: If you don't want to wade through that thread, here's a single image strip of that OP descending into madness as he shows how he took the "k-1" photo: https://i.imgur.com/Z12CC.jpg
In any case, I’d be curious to have joerg colberg’s take on this. Looks like he touches upon it tangentially[1] but not full on.
It’s how I am supposed to picture myself to make a good selfie…and also how selfies are cast as shallow to make them easy to dismiss.
Even though Ansel Adams’ self portraits will hang on gallery walls as dearly priced artifacts.
- I had a fie.
- ???
- Ah, it's just like selfie, but when someone else is making it for you.
(Ha, you expected me to write about a problem in how people use language, got ya :-)
A selfie can really be any picture where you’re holding the camera and in the frame. The subject of the photo can be something other than you.
“I took a selfie with…” means that I and the other thing are the subjects.
“I took a selfie of…” means that the other thing is the subject I’m just in the picture.
You can see this in other common phrases.
Take "miles per hour" for example. I've met plenty of people who can't figure out how long it would take to get from A to B at X mph. They'll deliberate over how they know from running on their treadmill that they run (on average) at 8 mph, and they recall that it usually takes them Y minutes to run Z miles, and then they factor in the diameter of their car's wheels (because surely a car with larger wheels gets there faster for the same mph vs a car with smaller wheels), and finally sprinkle in a bit of multiplication to arrive at their best guestimate.
That is, plenty of people don't realize that "per" means "for each", and that it's not some singular word "milesperhour", but a phrase meaning "miles traveled for every hour spent travelling".
Other fun phrases thrown around without understanding (or with similar words mistakenly swapped in):
Miles per gallon.
For all intensive purposes.
Nip it in the butt.
Bone apple tea.
I used to pat myself on the back for artsy seashell misty forest autumn leaf postcard stuff. In a world of hyper technical gear none of that is exceptional any more.
The composition and lighting of people and their faces is all.
( here is one of the earlier works I actually scanned and inverted. https://mega.nz/file/1RhWwRTZ#q7jD9rbC2kph5VmX9q1Zv0ju-035HB... )
I mean the American Method is still running round in photographic circles as obsession with corner sharpness as a marker of self seriousness…and that’s where the book starts.
If I had an unmet need, it is the entirety American focus of the book leaves me a bit blind to the bigger picture. What was it like, I wonder, in Japan?
But then again, good books should raise new questions because new questions are the mark of learning. Beil’s book certainly feels like a potentially “important book” on US photographic history to me. YMMV.
iOS https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965
Android https://www.androidbeat.com/2018/10/pixel-3-how-shoot-raw-dn...
Alternative iOS camera app:
Making any such assumption, of any quality, is egregious; it has no place in the camera application, other than as some opt-in configuration in the category of special effects.
@chefandy suggested a better title, and I'd agree. I'd suggest however that his/her title is too gentle. I'd say "How Mass Popularity and Tech Influenced Perception of Photography" because it speaks to the culturally aggregating effect of the Internet.