Photos are too flattering now

I don't agree with it, either. First, many lenses in the film era gave a bit softer results. Second, the transitions in film are smoother, and higher-speed films have grain that tends to make faces look better than a digital sensor.

I think the article's point is more so that people are constantly prepared for having their picture taken where as previously people would go to social functions without the constant expectation of being on camera.

I don't really disagree with their points but I think its important to realize that its actually only a small number of people that actually take that many selfies.

I honestly can't say if I agree with it or not. Article seemed to finish without any conclusion/resolution/climax... I kept scrolling to see if there was more underneath the ads.

Yes, people take more selfies and care about them more.

Is it a purely technology driven change? Is it culture? Will it change again and how fast? Why is it? What is the impact? Not addressed. I'm not even 100% sure if the author IS truly lamenting the perceived disappearance of bad photos.

That being said, my 2 cents;

1. Bad photos still abound. On my facebook feed at least :). They can be bad in many different ways - poor lighting, poor framing, awkward pose or expression, uninteresting subject, or any number of other perceived flaws.

2. There were always people who cared about photography (and took great photos in 70's 80's 90's etc), and those who didn't. Ratio may have changed. If more people care about photography and take great photos - not only of people as article focuses on, but also landscape and food and product and vacation and architecture... doesn't that just raise the standard and as a result we all get better photos to enjoy? If this is not a win, article doesn't discuss why. Nobody is stopping anybody, including author, from taking "bad" or "so bad they're good" or "brutally casual" photos to their heart's content; if the article is of the "I wish more people did things the way I want them to" / "Lamenting random thing of the past that's done less now" format, again, I'd like more depth to it to be interesting. Is there possibility people ARE taking and even cherishing such photos, just not sharing them? And if nobody is taking enjoying or sharing such photos, implying nobody wants to / cares, under what criteria is that a bad thing? :)

3. People will disagree what makes a "good photo". Today fashions are faster than ever. Posed, real casual, fake casual, real bad, fake bad, processed, unprocessed, seemingly unprocessed... all of these go in and out and have their own subcultures. In many ways, a posed 90's wedding photo, by today's standards, looks more awkward than 90's casual wedding photo. Whereas 2015 "casual wedding photo" was "faked" or rather arranged to one degree or another. Our very perception of "Casual look" has changed dramatically. If you want to future-proof, a lightly-processed, lightly-and-invisibly-arranged photo seems to stand test of time the best, i.e. classics seem to remain classics.

4. People have more choices to capture retain and view what they want; remember their own past or view others through whichever selective lens they want. Again, article doesn't even touch on any pros or cons.

So I still feel like I've been bamboozled and am missing the significant half/conclusion of the article :D

Edit; As for modern phones - most flagships now offer immediate one-click change of lighting, blurred background, skin-healing, even focal length adjustment so ears and nose don't look disproportionate. And even to this day, there are people who know to use their zoom lens for portraits and those who don't.

I tend to agree with you. I too have spent time doing amateur digital and film. I started shooting on 110mm cameras when I was < 10, and those photos were bad!. By 13 I'd graduated to a low-end SLR and learned to use it properly. I shot on that all through high school and college. I was recently looking at some of my old photos, and I'm very pleased to have good photos from those youthful years, whereas my friends only have the crummy photos the author describes. I've gotten back into film, developing it at home, and having fun pushing the limits of the medium. It's a true pleasure.

Film can take _great_ photos! But my takeaway from the article was that before the ubiquity of smart phones with great cameras packed full of auto-adjusting technology, the number of people able to take advantage of film was low. That is, the signal to noise ratio was low, whereas now it is high. Most people back then used disposable cameras, or fixed focus point-and-shoot ~ and they couldn't be bothered to invest in an SLR and learn the basics of photography (exposure, etc...). As a result, lots and lots of truly awful photos were taken.

Edit: I noticed that the articles title "Photos are too flattering now" is not as same as the <title> tag, which is "The Internet Killed Bad Photos". I think that photos are not too/excesively flattering, and I think it was improved cameras that killed bad photos, not the internet. A better title would be "The ubiquity of high-quality entry-level cameras has dramatically improved photo quality amongst the general population." ~ a far less sexy title.

I generally agree with your comments. I did a fair bit of film photography (mostly B&W) decades ago. From digital photography perspective, I'm an average Joe who mostly takes snapshots with smartphone. I just wanted to make a comment about post-processing.

Post-processing with film (ignoring modern-day scanning to digital) historically required one to have a darkroom (and skills) to do the desired post-processing. I did this a lot when I worked for a small town newspaper many years ago. Often, the writers/editors would take photos from whatever events they attended. I'd print a contact sheet for them (after developing the film) and then they'd use a grease pencil to circle the ones they wanted to include for publication. The majority of the prints I made involved doing some combination of cropping, dodging, burning, and enlarger exposure adjustments to make the end result better looking than the original. The writers would often make comments like "Wow, I'm a pretty good photographer!" after seeing the final prints. I would just smile and say "yeah, it turned out good" without mentioning all of the darkroom improvements that were made. All of this to say that historically, the only people that usually had any post-processing of their film photographs were those who had darkrooms or professionals who would have some of their prints air-brushed.

Contrast that with any of the common digital cameras now (including smartphones). Many, if not the vast majority, have built-in capabilities for red-eye removal, adjusting brightness, color correction, cropping, etc. On top of this, the bar is quite low (and tools are plenty) for doing post-processing on the computer. It seems that many (most?) of the serious amateurs and professionals routinely do post-processing of the shots they care about. I would think that post-processing is more common with digital for the serious amateurs and professionals as compared with film (prior to digital scanning), and is now a thing by many (to some extent) of the smartphone casual photographers.

Anecdotally, I grew up that way pre-digital cameras (I'm 29, my mom is a photographer) and I actively avoid having my picture taken to this day because of it.

I occasionally take pictures, but I make sure to ask "Can I take your picture?" Every. Single. Time. Consent matters. If you're a parent who likes taking pictures, you should do the same as soon as your kid is old enough to understand and respond to the question.

Anecdotally, kids ask for their photos to be taken, because they see making photo as sign they do something special.

For kids, it is normal.

thank you for your service, me too!

I turned off the "touch-up" checkbox on my video conferencing software.

I don't want to be meeting anybody in person and have them think - this dude looks terrible. Let's just set that expectation from the beginning.

I sure hope I look worse in photos than I look in person, if the photos of me are "flattering" I'm going to go hide in a cave to spare the rest of you.

I am tackling the problem side-on as no algorithm has managed to beautify a profile picture of me.

You missed out on the ubiquity of Polaroid nudes in the 70's and 80's. They always had this seedy vibe... it's like they made sex taboo just by virtue of lighting. Or perhaps we now associate that thanks to Polaroid.

That an interesting strategy. I usually do the opposite, and instinctively smile when a camera is pointed my way. Better to get as good a look as possible rather than capture my usual relaxed scowl for posterity.

I was "lucky" enough to do high school/college just before digital photography became mainstream, so I'm grateful for all the things not documented and published to the world.

That said, in way too many of the photos I do have from those days I'm mugging for the camera or flipping the bird or something else ridiculous. In retrospect, I've come to similar conclusions about my likely motivations.

For me, it's not so much the storage; that's cheap. But without some level of curation, whether or not you actually delete most of the "rejects," it's a management headache. How do you find the shots you care about buried by everything else?

If you hoard things, you end up learning a new rule "if you can't find it, you don't own it"... if you don't curate, you'll learn the rule as well.

My old Samsung phone had a very slight fisheye effect. If your face was in the middle of the picture it was very slimming, but you could see the distortion at the outer edges once you knew to look for it.

Is this satire?

your example is taken neither from an SLR nor a rangefinder. And it's taken by Ansel Adams.

This has to be satire

For people, see https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/

"mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men"