Camera Restricta (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Camera Restricta (2015)

philippschmitt.com

25 pointsadmp12 comments

I love social experiments like that, makes you think about our own behavior.

On a side note, I am always amazed to the kind of representation bias trap we all fall into: we always picture things the way we commonly know about it/remember it (see the NY museum pics in the video). One can experience the same creepy sense by playing QuickDraw[1] and watching sketches by others. For computer vision practitioners, no need to perform data augmentation, let (a sufficient gigantic amount of) the humans be! (Half-kidding)

[1] https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/

It would actually be useful to make a camera that does the opposite. When you snap a crappy photo, it searches the web for a better photo taken in the same spot, perhaps by a professional photographer with a better camera!

See CCamera by Marco Land and Blind Camera by Sascha POHFLEPP

Love the fact that the camera says YES when you can shoot, but "NEIN" when it decides you can't.

Saying "no" in German carries just so much more weight :D

Interesting thought experiment, but would be soo frustrating when my kid takes his/her first step outside Buckingham Castle. Location isn't the only variable making images interesting.

That said, I admire people that bring these kinds of projects to the world. There's more to projects than the useability of the result.

Love the idea. I think it would be interesting to convert the photos taken at a place into 3D space and only prevent people from taking photos of the same stuff from the same angles. Taking pictures of unseen places is great, but so, too, is photographing something commonplace in a unique way.

I can imagine a version of this which uses StableDiffusion or something similar to analyze your photo and chastise you for your lack of originality. Another photo of latte art and your eggs Benedict? Not good enough, try harder. The millionth photo of the Eiffel Tower? Nope, deleted.

A lot of photographs are taken in boring light. This camera could also help by saying how many photos were taken at this time of day. Good lighting is so much more than full overhead sunshine, just after lunch.

But also, there are no rules!

On the contrary, my view is that a lot of highly-regarded photos are super boring because the only thing they feature is interesting light, which you can get anywhere by getting your ass up at 4am and trekking out to wherever you want for sunrise. Almost everything looks good at sunrise. You don't even need an interesting composition. Just find some rocks and get your ass up at 4am and you can make a Insta-worthy photo.

On the other hand there are a small handful of VERY GOOD photos taken in boring light, because they feature interesting composition. Taking a very good photo at mid-day is a huge challenge, and perhaps a very worthwhile exercise!

Some photographers seek out postcard racks (are those still a thing?) to see what all the best local pictures are before taking their own (owning the copyright) in today's light good or bad.

Would be a useful app to find near identical or at least overlapping images online that can be viewed as a stereo pair.

It does not tell if the phone is also acting as the camera or if they have a separate sensor for the camera part

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