That's compounded by how much lighting education is based around white people with blond hair.
This talk from SIGGRAPH 2021 is excellent at going into the history of film and lighting and how it favors a very specific look
What you are doing is making tradeoffs of what looks good and what doesn't. And the tradeoff that was made was that white skin needed to look good and black skin didn't matter.
ie. it’s about using more inclusive test cases and acceptance criteria for engineering projects
Edit: then again they could still decide to make the tradeoff to “ignore” 13% of the population in their products if the extra engineering required increased costs/time by enough
In that I mean, I don't think the companies were ever purposefully blind to darker skins - just stuck with it and said 'good enough ship it.' It also makes me wonder what if a darker skinned person invented the tech. Would they say it's garbage? Did that give light skinned people an advantage? Interesting thoughts.
Even today this is only accomplished on phones by HDR to the point of making every photo look fake. Apparently photography is hard, it must be if we are still here with this problem... which makes me appreciate my own eyeballs even more.
That aside...my wife is a dark skinned person. That I cannot take a normal photo of her without blowing out the background is infuriating. Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob. If I click her face, she looks normal but standing in front of a nuclear blast.
Not because I think any company is racist, but because I wonder why we are still stuck with it. If our eyes see people in a way, and have for all of time, why in the age of nanobots and ai and everything else still failing so badly?
If your wife’s skin is significantly darker than the background and your photographic process doesn’t have the dynamic range for both, you can e.g. use fill flash, bounce extra light off a large reflector onto her face, use a filter over the lens (works well for taking B&W images in some situations), or take a picture using a process with better dynamic range (and optionally play with the image when printing, either lightening specific parts or applying some global lightness curve; e.g. you can take 2 pictures with one exposed for the foreground and the other exposed for the background and blend them in software).
> Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob.
This happens to a substantial extent to people of all skin tones, though the darker the skin the harder it gets. The sunset is much, much brighter than foreground objects. Try fill flash (and if the results are poor, try to figure out how to position your flash somewhere further from the lens, e.g. by using a separate flash).
My iphone 13 for example visibly highlights my face in a backlit selfie a few seconds after taking the photo.
https://gizmodo.com/this-amazing-camera-can-capture-both-the...
The size of sensors is decreasing, and currently you can recreate the performance of that 2012 tech with a sensor about 20% its size but about the same price.
The problem with cameras is this: You need more sensors crammed into smaller space (megapixels) with higher resolution of the range of frequencies each sensor captures (dynamic range,) and/or a higher rate of sampling per sensor to improve the quality of images (framerate.)
The chips used are already running at maximum speed, so the size of a sensor is constrained by how many pixels can be processed at framerates expected by consumers, usually 30 to 60 fps for video.
You can adjust the dynamic range using physical color filters in the lenses, removing all infrared for example. Then the sensors will only trigger on visible light, and you can tweak the sensors to bethere are other tricks used to optimize what's being captured. The issue is sensitivity - the number of photons hitting a sensor required to activate it. Darker colors reflect fewer photons, so lighter colors "overwhelm" the sensors. Even multiple samples can't overcome some of the limitations, among which is certain conditions in which black skin shows up weirdly in video and images (to the perennial frustration of digital photographers, and a frequent topic of complaint amongst pornographers.)
https://www.ovt.com/sensors/OV9716
This latest high end sensor has between 18-20 bits of dynamic range, or 120db resolution. This is getting close to human performance, and if the world doesn't fall apart in the next ten years, there will be human equivalent hdr cameras on phones, and there won't be a camera problem for darker skinned people anymore.
In the meantime, if your camera can save photos in .raw format, it's the unprocessed output from the sensor itself. You can process the raw pictures with desktop applications like photoshop to correct the colors, and turn those sunset photos of your wife into memories instead of disappointments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format
There's a whole slew of tutorials and applications for correcting issues with skin tones and different lighting conditions. There's a bit of a learning curve, but something most people can accomplish in an afternoon.
Photography and digital sensors are less than 200 years old.
The film technology 50 years ago was not racist. The people who designed that film technology didn't care enough to put the effort into developing film technology that could discern multiple shades of darker skin tones. It is not direct racism like actively trying to take away a black person's right to vote. It is indirect racism of not caring enough about black people to try to make film record their skin tones better. Once the furniture and chocolate industry showed up with the money to have brown tones recorded better on film suddenly Kodak was interested.
We're stuck with it because it's a hard problem.
Where is the big disconnect in that our own eyes can do these things so easily, and no camera can? It's not any insult to cameras, but a genuine question.
Our eyes aren't actually 24 bit per frame. In fact our eyes are pretty shit. What they're good at is fairly quickly moving and adjusting, and are backed by a processor (our brain) that is capable of converting that data into a spatially aware image.
In fact our brain doesn't even really see much of the view. It's filling in a lot of blanks based on the understanding of the scene.
Cameras are trying to capture that into a still. You can capture multiple stills together with different exposures, but you're going to battle things like motion etc..
Most cameras these days are in the 10-14 bit range which is a function of the range the photosites will respond too before saturating, but also given that most displays are 8 bit, after a point there's just diminishing gains.
14 bits allows for a lot of latitude when shooting and processing.
Supporting more range of color depth means that the raw output of the sensor is necessarily bigger. This means we have some range of tradeoffs to make in the camera:
* Save the sensor output directly as a RAW image onto storage. This means your storage medium can store fewer photos. You're also now beholden to the speed of your storage. Specialty photography like wildlife and sports impose requirements like being able to take lots of pictures per second; cameras solve this by having large memory buffers. Slow storage means the buffer fills up quicker.
* Compress your RAW images with lossless algorithms. These do a decent job, but they still result in big files on storage media. Same problems as earlier point. Need quite a bit of memory and CPU on the camera to deal with this, and plus this now competes with how many shots per second you can buffer.
* Compress your images with lossy algorithms (output RAW or JPEGs). Pretty much unacceptable since you don't get to decide what detail the algorithm removes.
Of course, this also imposes hardware demands on the photographer's computer. Big images require:
* Lots of storage. Maybe time to pay for a lot of cloud storage?
* Fast storage too because otherwise Lightroom takes forever to load an image
* Lots of RAM so that Lightroom can cache more images at once so you can flip back and forth with more ease.
* Fast RAM and CPU so that Lightroom can do adjustments without much lag (some of this can be offloaded to GPU, but it's not a drastic improvement).
Now, I think these problems are solvable today. They just require obscene amounts of money.
I do want to add, RAW images by today's consumer-level cameras do support a fairly wide dynamic range. A skilled photographer will know how to work with RAW files to bring out details from the extreme ends of the range (e.g. dark skin against a bright background). But it does require setting up the shot well, and one can only capture so much range (e.g. I have a few bird pictures where part of the bird is still totally blown out and unrecoverable because of sunlight).
The limitation in all photographic technologies has to do with the fundamental light gathering mechanism. In the case of photographic film, it is grains of photosensitive chemicals such as silver halides. In the case of digital cameras it is photosensitive semiconductors called CCDs or CMOS sensors. These sensors (chemical and digital) operate by collecting photons during the exposure. In either case, and with our eyes too, they can only collect so many photons before they “fill up.”
In the case of film, this meant enough photons had arrived at the grain of silver halide to provide it with the energy needed to cause the reaction to take place. This reaction causes an irreversible change in the colour of the grain. In the case of digital sensors, when enough photons arrive the device stores its maximum possible charge which is then read out and converted to a number (usually the maximum number for that integer type).
So then why can’t we make photographic technology that can gather a larger number of photons before “filling up”? It’s a tradeoff. The larger we make the (sensors or film grains) the more capacity for light gathering (called dynamic range) they have, but the lower the resolution they have. Unfortunately, in the world of consumer devices, resolution (megapixels) is king.
The fundamental problem we’re dealing with in nature is that the dynamic range of real life is many orders of magnitude. Outdoor midday sunlight can be something like a hundred million photons per second per pixel whereas night time under starlight that falls to less than one photon per second per pixel.
Or maybe that would make no sense, so there's no basis for your conspiratorial conjecture.
Centuries of collective effort by engineers and chemists went into these photographic technologies. If photographs of wealthy people in Rochester, NY in the first half of the 20th century had looked terrible, they would have kept tweaking the technology until they fixed it.
There's both a technical and a societal element to it.
I suggest watching this video , especially from the 25 minute mark
So getting exposure isn't just an arbitrary value. It's relative to tons of things, so it's always been possible to shoot darker skin.
The issue wasn't just exposure though. It's actually quite possible to shoot darker skin in lower light. You just need to know how to light it and capture the skin. (E.g darker tones are more specular on film)
The issue was color calibration and education. Film was designed to highlight certain tones, lighting setups were geared towards certain demographics. Those were the demographics that a segregated society preferred to show, and in turn made it so darker skinned demographics weren't equally visually representable.
You absolutely do not need HDR photography to shoot darker skin with lighter skin. In fact most cameras have enough dynamic range today to deal without an HDR capture.
We may be conflating techs(my fault). I'm mostly interested in digital, so I can't defend much about film.
I know of no phone camera that can do what you say. As a diverse family, either I'm blown out, or my wife looks like a chunk of coal. Even her Fuji digicam behaves this way.
iPhones and Pixels have gotten a lot better at optimizing images for multiple ethnicities, but not everyone has the same processing accumen.
On the standalone camera, shoot RAW if you can. If you're shooting jpeg, you're beholden to the cameras signal processing which can still be quite biased to certain tones. It'll require you to process the image yourself, but you'll have access to a lot more range than the jpeg output.
If you mess with the curves by raising the shadows or lowering the highlights, the image will look strange.
If you photograph something with a large difference between lights and darks and want to convey as much information as you can, you have to use some additional lighting, like speedlights, studio lights, reflectors.
In photography, exposure is the amount of light per unit area (the image plane illuminance times the exposure time) reaching a frame of photographic film or the surface of an electronic image sensor, as determined by shutter speed, lens aperture, and scene luminance. Exposure is measured in lux seconds, and can be computed from exposure value (EV) and scene luminance in a specified region. [1]
Image lightness can be affected by both exposure and ISO. But since film had a reduced dynamic range, the truth is it can't reproduce reliable both dark tones and skin tones at the same time. It's a technical limitation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_(photography)
>You absolutely do not need HDR photography to shoot darker skin with lighter skin. In fact most cameras have enough dynamic range today to deal without an HDR capture.
Actually if you have two individuals side by side, one with dark skin, one with white skin you can't shoot both at the same time and have both look good if the lighting is the same.
Cameras can record at most 14 - 15 Evs of dynamic range. The difference between the light falling on those two persons is more than that.
I invite you to look through various press photographs of Martin Luther King Jr. meeting Lyndon Johnson. Some of them do a very good job of capturing both men; others don't.
If you're under or over exposed, someone might clip out sooner , but a well exposed image will have enough latitude to capture both.
Given that narrow range, you could either expose for lighter or darker skin tones. And this is where institutional racism creeps in. In a group where everyone had similar skin tones, you wouldn't face an issue exposing the film properly. But where there was a variety, it was commonplace to treat exposing for the lighter skin tones as more important. The group with darker skin was treated as if it didn't matter, or mattered far less.
I think this is the key idea. Even rejecting the idea that Kodak and other film companies made the choice to exclude a group of people, they created a default, an inertia, which had to worked against to be equitable. My mind keeps coming back to the Pareto principle. In pursuing the 80% of customers might be the wealthier group, the easier to convert, the most likely to use your product, is it often the same %20 who are left out and don't they matter?
Like you said, at the root of that is racism, but the presentation frames it in an interesting way. Not everyone who takes part in this research is racist, but they're the products of racism in society.
So color not being accurately reproduced could either be a direct product of racist people or the result of people in a society that doesn't value everyone equally.
But I like the wording of "anti racist research" because it pushes the onus to actively trying to analyze if things are fair, rather than assuming they are. Even people who aren't actively racist can benefit their research from trying to push past the biases inherent in society that permiates everything
That’s the point. There is no talk about the initial design.
If you think in this specific case that the authors are implying X by saying Y, then you need to explain why you think that.
In particular:
> ... And that’s because, even if we think of the camera as a neutral technology, it is not. In the vast spectrum of human colors, photographic tools and practices tend to prioritize the lighter end of that range. And that bias has been there since the very beginning.
And that bit is in the intro portion of the article, making me think that it's part of the premise that the camera is "not a neutral technology".
For those not familiar with 99pi, the focus is on how makers/designers make choices that can often be invisible to us, but influence the environment we live on. This is a fantastic podcast I would recommend to anyone curious about the world we live in. It has biases, but they are stated and argumented, not just thrown around irresponsibly.
In this specific case, there was two specific angles:
- the film industry as a whole didn't really care about diversity, and film dynamic range was deemed good enough if it could represent lighter flesh tones and bright surroundings. Kodak exec is quoted on this subject as really not giving a damn about darker skins, and their rationale for making efforts to expend dynamic range a lot further was to allow better representation of white and dark chocolate products, among others.
You might disagree with that take, but it all comes from Kodak employees from that area, as far as I understand.
- the other was on print calibration: whatever you did with your camera, printing at a Kodak shop would be done with presets setting adjusted for light tone skins (the "Shirley cards" of the title are the photos of white girls used as reference) Here again, the info comes from technician working on printing at the time.
PS: Then there's more stories on group photos, light meters etc. if you care at all I would recommend listening to the whole thing. I also do photography (as an amateur) and it was still interesting to me.
The issue is, you might get a thousand reader interested in the physics and chemistry of film in a specialty magazine about photography. And the oral history of black photographers of that era and the tricks that they used to capture these hard to get ranges of color.
Or, if you write it online and blame racism, you can get 100'000 readers once you get someone majoring in liberal arts to share it.
It seems unlikely to me that the amount of light reflected off darker skin fundamentally confounds cameras when they can handle four orders of magnitude of illumination variation gracefully.