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Comment by mibbitor | Hacker News Reader

And what about when your camera floats around automatically getting every available shot, every available composition, framing, leaving you to just select the best?

There are only so many parameters that make up a recording of light. Sorry, but I do not see a massive amount of skill involved in it now that you can brute force most of it, or have it automatically done for you.

We've also been fed so many fantastic photos online etc, that we rarely go "wow" any more. For all we know it could be a photo, a photoshop, a CGI. What was once amazing is now often the norm.

I really wouldn't like to be a professional photographer these days, as I just don't think you can make much money at it.

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"And what about when your camera floats around automatically getting every available shot, every available composition, framing, leaving you to just select the best?"

Haha yeah, I guess if you disregard the context of time, weather, effort, mobility, and all that non-idealized crap, you could probably systematically move around with your magic jetpack and a camera with infinite battery or whatever it is camera's have nowadays. Then you could simply brute-force every available composition like a computer would. Beep boop.

"There are only so many parameters that make up a recording of light. Sorry, but I do not see a massive amount of skill involved in it now that you can brute force most of it, or have it automatically done for you."

Fellow computer: sudo take a gorgeous photo of a snowy landscape, and fall back on the brute-force algorithm if necessary. Make it quick, I have to find my way back by noon and I don't trust my A* algorithm.

Ridiculous. By that logic, we will soon all stop writing (let alone write for any sort of direct or indirect compensation) because "no massive amount of skill is involved". Instead, we can just brute force it and simply pick the best novels, technical documentation (or HN comments, for that matter) from the many choices of million-character sequences presented to us.

It's an orders of magnitude different problem.

Taking photos is just recording light that exists. You can change the position, lighting, a few options on the camera, but it's easy enough to say that for a given location, probably a few thousand photos would cover most of the possibles.

Writing involves thought. After you've typed even a few characters you're past a few thousand possible combinations. Brute forcing writing isn't feasible.

I've thought about this a bit. And my prediction is that a wedding photographer, for example, will set up several cameras around the room that will recored very high res video.

Later a computer will recreate the entire event and the photographer will fly around with a virtual camera and select the best shots.

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