Why I stopped taking photographs almost altogether | Hacker News Reader

Why I stopped taking photographs almost altogether

en.wikipedia.org

51 pointsakolbe62 comments

You do not need to be the first, to be the newest, to be the most unique, to stand out at all, on anything you do - including pictures.

Your entire life and everything you do in it is more like a vote than it is a work of art. That's a good thing.

You can take a low res picture of that sunset in a mundane place half obscured by trees and local housing because you want to emphasize the moment and how you feel in it. It does not need to be a commodity to share.

High quality photos are great, but comparing the photos you would take to capture part of your life to the photos others take of theirs is like judging an autobiography by the font choice.

Right here, right now, you vote with every action you take. Photo, small talk, dream job, favorite ice cream, whatever. To me, a million people taking different kinds of shitty photos of something is much more interesting than the single highest quality professional photograph of the same thing.

We will have nice photos of everything, that's great, but if we all stop doing our own shitty versions of stuff then so much signal is lost across the population as a whole

This is perhaps one of the sadder articles I have ever seen on here, and endemic of a lot other parts of society. "Somebody already posted a pretty picture online, there is now no point in me taking pictures ever again."

Imgur/Tiktok/TV give me this sensation constantly. The pictures and lives they all claim to have are all so incredible, I should never move again. I can never do anything as cool or fun as them anyway. I just should just sit alone and jitter with jealousy/misery/desire/hate at how boring my life is compared to "get naked in the woods and have a dance party island."

I don't get the impression that the author is particularly disappointed by this state of affairs, though. Their passion seems to be less in the photography, and more in the collation and organisation of images - and if they can't get enough images themselves, they'll go out there and take them. My impression of the post was that they seemed positive that other people are doing this work - and far better than the writers - leaving them to get on with doing other things.

I guess it's similar to the tradeoffs of moving from doing a particular job, to managing others doing the job. Yes, you're less hands-on, but if you do your job well, you become a force-multiplier for other people, which for some people can be much more rewarding.

I know another active Wikipedian photographer, and I get the impression that, while he enjoys the photography, the joy for him comes predominantly from the use of the photos, rather than the experience of using them. If he didn't need to take photos, I imagine he'd find some other, similar way to satisfy his archivist urges.

I took up dirt bike riding recently. Much more fun than watching a video about it.

I’m backronyming that D is for dirt bike and you can’t stop me!

the hobby I want requires decades of practice and I just somehow never have enough energy or motivation to do that practice. There's a severe lack of content about it, and I want more than anything to do something about that, but I just can't.

It makes me sad that there are people out there that just choose not to do certain things out of "not-being-the-very-first-itis", yet I want to do this thing so badly and can't.

Sigh.

What is it? Like an instrument or painting or something?

Have you tried documenting it but never publishing? Or publishing but never looking at the stats? Any step towards a goal counts for something.

Eh, it's an art style. And I'm not an artist. I want to be an artist, but practicing is seemingly too hard for my ADHD. :(

Do you have a space in your house that would work? Do you have materials? I think set very simple and comfortable steps. Order materials, but don't stress about getting the right ones - just get cheap stuff. Set up a place you can do it. Then one day soon, you'll be in a position to make a single mark and get started.

If it's not digital, you could try a digital version. iPad and Pencil is great fun doodling/painting on the couch.

If not digital, watercolour pencils are a great way to get results as an amateur.

Looks at my $700 reMarkable 2, which I got for this purpose. Loved to use it every time I was actually able to pick it up. It sits next to me at all times, within arm's reach, yet I do not pick it up.

ADHD sucks balls.

Weird take.

Instead of wasting time not being present in the moment, you can free yourself from the burden of "capturing the moment" in a picture that millions of other untold people have and will equally capture. And instead you can actually live your life. In the moment. With full presence.

Weird take. As a hobby photographer who takes 15k / year, the act of photography IS what I like about seeing a moment or living life with full presence. Certainly not true for everyone

I'd agree with that. People get different things from different actions. Like you, documenting a place or an experience gives me purpose and challenge. I can be happy just experiencing a place, or trying to capture it in a particular way.

Enjoying the process is much more rewarding then enjoying the products of any given action.

I agree. There are people out there with 50k pictures on their phone. How often do you think they look at them? Data hoarders.

Make memories with your brain. If you don't remember an event it was probably not all that good anyway.

> Make memories with your brain. If you don't remember an event it was probably not all that good anyway.

I have to strongly disagree with this. Memories fade with time/age, and for those of us without a visual memory, photos can mean the difference between staying connected to certain memories and mostly losing them.

I easily have 50K photos, and I love that I can refresh my memory of a time and place easily. It’s in a similar category as journaling in my view. Modern photo libraries make this even more practical with map overlays and AI classification for east keyword searches.

People build “second brains” for a reason.

I'd strongly agree also. I get a lot personally out of remembering events where those memories have been evoked by seeing an old photo. It might be something from 40 years ago, or four years ago, and definitely includes fantastic events that shrink in remembering any sort of busy life.

Even just last night, we were looking through old photos at my parents' house. My dad had found a photo of repairing a lintel and brickwork with his father (then a retired builder). It was definitely a positive discovery, but he'd said that he'd forgotten the photo existed. The photo had other clues as well, like small construction projects in the background, timing of the year in the garden, etc.

What I like to do is to make pictures of mundane parts of my life, my desk while working, the living room while watching tv when it is a mess. Things like that. Later in live these pictures are the most valuable to me. They are full of little nostalgic memories. I also like taking pictures of nature, forests, insects etc. but I actually never look at them again.

yeah, these are the kind of pictures i most often wish i had made. how did my room in that house look like back then when i lived over there? most of my pictures seem to be of people, friends, family. others mainly are made with the intention of sharing.

it's not about data hoarding, it's just that among those photos are some important ones and the work to sort and throw out the unimportant ones is just to much.

i have backups of social media apps with all photos they ever loaded (because there is no other way to export photos from the app in bulk). that means it is 95% junk. but sorting through that junk is just to much effort. but i am not going to delete it because of those 5%. maybe if i haven't had the need to search for something for more than a decade then i can delete them (but managing old backups is an effort in itself). or i'll find an AI tool that can help me categorize the pictures.

That was really confusing to me. The article gave no real reason why the author stopped taking photos. It's not at all clear that he what he did was stop taking photos to upload to Wikipedia.

Read the citation [N 1] and you'll figure it out pdq

Seems odd to me. It's certainly true for the few percent of most popular subjects but not for the long tail.

Load the wikipedia page for the town you live in or a less populous neighboring town. Follow the links to the articles on some of the things in your town-- parks, etc. For most people you'll immediately find articles without images. Searching the internet usually won't get you images or at least not any freely licensable ones.

And when you do find images they're often random snapshots and not images taken with a particular eye for their educational/informative/representative qualities. If there are many photos then sure, suitable ones can be found. But when there are few pictures then getting one that captures the right presentation is just luck unless you go and take one.

A problem I've seen on Wikipedia is that I'd go through a lot of work to create an illustration for an article, then someone will replace it with another image which is then removed on its own merits (like a non-freely licensed one, or some vanity picture of themself)... and no one goes back and rescues the prior image from the history. I wouldn't mind if my contribution had been replaced by something even better, but it's a bit sad to see it lost to wikirot.

There are whole domains of archivist photography that could be included on Wikipedia (or on sister pages for subjects on commons) that are largely untapped-- images captured from the same location at different times of day or times of year, HDR panoramas for capturing incident lighting at a location, intentional catalogs of plant and animal life, 3d models, etc. The only domain that you can say is already well covered is random tourist snapshots of locations tourists are prone to visit.

1) a lot of people live in big cities

2) this Wikipedia contributor seems to prefer providing the best photos to Wikipedia rather than taking the photos themselves. The photography to them is a means to an end, and they have found a better / more efficient way to acquire the photos (better: higher quality due to photographer skill, more efficient because they can manage multiple photographers)

For the other lot of people who don't live in big cities: go document your region on Wikipedia!! Your home is cool! Share it with the world! Contribute to public domain repositories!

I was attempting to capture your (1) with "or a less populous neighboring town". :)

On (2)-- indeed, good for them. But that's a product of their own specifics and preferences, not a property of everything already being photographed as that is far from true.

I can still be glad for all Wikimedians taking photographs in rural areas, and of short events, Wikimedia culture, hard-to-access places, hard-to-find items, and other subjects that are rarely available as free images.

Yeah, if you live in a small town, it can be hard to find good photos of it online at all.

I will note that regardless of size, cities are living things (a la the phrase "living language") and photos can rapidly become out of date when new structures go up, policies change, etc. So while the author of this piece has chosen to largely stop taking such photos, which is fine, there is really no reason to feel like "There are enough photos of [some big city] and we just don't need more."

Skylines change. Cultural practices change. Etc.

Sometimes you notice that change because you went looking at photos and noticed something that you didn't notice while living through those changes firsthand.

Someone once told me three-quarters of your photographs should be of people, since those are the only ones you'll care about in a decade, and the rest should be for people.

Perhaps Wikipedia photographs count as "for people".

Three quarters of your photos should be of… whatever you want them to be of.

For me, the value in photos is the process itself. Finding the composition, getting the shot, then editing it when I get home. Whether or not I ever look at the photos ever again after that, I got enjoyment out of creating them. Other people might want to take snapshots of everything they see. /shrug.

I do often look back less favourably on photos I've taken that don't have people in them. I have to keep reminding myself to include people in my photos.

It's always weird to me when everyone at a fireworks show on the Fourth of July has their phones out taking video. There are a gazillion videos of better fireworks shows taken with better video equipment. Why do you need a phone video of this one?

If you're taking a short clip to post to social media, I can understand that, but these people who hold their phones up and watch the show through the screen for the entire duration... why?

I usually prefer my own crappy amateur photos over other people's professional ones.

Not specifically of fireworks, but I really like the photo I just made of the Jungfrau while the Eiger and Mönch are covered by some really cool clouds, for example.

Try watching an American Grand Prix but focus on the shots of the crowd. At least half of all attendees will be watching the GP through their phone screens. It blows my mind.

Is that really any different than using an AM radio while at the ball park?

The commentators on AM were amazing, and it was real time - hardly any noticeable delay at all. Best of both worlds.

Racing has really embraced technology. You can watch races from the drivers standpoint, and see all the detailed stats in real time. It makes sense to watch both the live race and your phone.

Even without that kind of feed, I could see people using the phone as binoculars. My eyesight is going and I find myself doing this a lot :-)

When I say people are watching through their phone, I mean they have their camera app open and are capturing terrible video of the race instead of just being there and enjoying the moment.

I believe in taking your own crappy pictures. I took a phone picture of a damselfly on a stem once. It was slightly out of focus, and the important part was very low resolution.

But I had a wonderful time using it as a reference to make a drawing of a damselfly that is completely uniquely mine.

Because photographs are most powerful as a store of/trigger for memories, and my photographs are better at that than someone else's, for the most part.

Concerts would occassionally be annoying if you were too close to the one or two whistlers thinking they’d make the live album.

Now it’s all weird, concerts are just phone conventions. Perhaps I should create a whistling app.

Studies show that people value things more highly if it’s their property.

We are animals. The stuff we collect (including our pictures) is part of our territory.

I live in an area that has very little information on Wikipedia and virtually no photographs. How would I find out what would be an appropriate kind of photograph to put on Wikipedia? I feel like editors as a rule are very hostile and it makes me anxious to contribute anything.

I have also come across a hostile editor on Wikipedia.

Why psychopaths rise to power

https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-think-interview/corrupt-...

> How would I find out what would be an appropriate kind of photograph to put on Wikipedia?

Anything that's relatively objective.

Pictures of structures, the more significant, the better. Bridges, for example. City halls, town halls, any 'grand' buildings in your town. Any buildings that seem unique or quirky.

Pictures that summarise a location: the average house, the average street, the average day.

https://www.shorpy.com/ has plenty of good examples of the type of 'documentarial' photos that would go over well.

Tldr: Because there already exist many photographs of what I photograph that are of good quality, and time seems to be better spent obtaining such photographs from others' collection than photographing them directly.

This gets me thinking about the issue of doing something for the satisfaction of the creative process vs the satisfaction of the practicality of the end result.

There are so many missing photographs. Perhaps we have enough pictures of Times Square, but we don't have enough pictures of inline water heaters, German International Driving Permits and so on.

I take a lot of those pictures because I need them to explain things, and they simply don't exist. I made a habit of releasing them on Wikimedia Commons for others to use.

“Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward.” – Ved Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita

Why cooking when you can order food? Anything done with your own hands will satisfy you much more even if not as good as the ready-made option.

I don't usually photograph places and stuff but I do take pictures of people I care about in places and in front of stuff. That I enjoy. But the really cool buildings and things I usually grab a picture online that's way better than what I would make.

Summary: this person stopped taking photos and uploading them to Wikipedia because public photos of urban areas that contribute to digital archives are now abundant.

Given the title, I was expecting something about why they stopped photography as a hobby, which is not what this article is about.

My father was a commercial photographer and graphic designer. I grew up with a darkroom in my basement and spent a great deal of time taking, developing, and printing photographs with various types of vintage equipment. I even spent my 20’s doing camerawork on feature films, commercials, music videos, etc when a lot of that work was still shot on Super 16.

Chemical photography was a beautiful, mysterious and physical process. I tried making the jump to digital - but… it had just lost its magic for me. Now, I just take snapshots on my phone like everyone else. They’re pretty good.

Chemical photography still has a lot of magic. Holding a developed photo in your hand is very visceral and satisfying compared to scrolling through hundreds on your phone.

I've started ordering prints (Fuji prints directly and the colors are fab) regularly and I'm considering buying a printer, mostly to try and scratch the same itch (I can't justify the space for a darkroom at the moment). If your snapshots are good, give it a go, you may be pleasantly surprised.

This doesn't just apply to film photography. I own a small photo printer (a Canon Selphy) for printing 4"x6" high quality prints, and it's astonishing how much more engaging it is to hold a physical print or flip through a photo book, even if they're digital shots.

I find a big iPad Pro comes pretty close to the same effect.

Which model, if I may ask?

I have a CP1300. The modern replacement is a CP1500. They’re much of a muchness.

Doesn't celluloid still have more resolution? See eg. the recent Oppenheimer release on 70mm film.

35mm film is equivalent to about 21MP.

https://api.filmfix.com/blog.asp?post=599

It's complicated, and there's no single way to answer that question.

The shortest answer is that inch for inch, high-megapixel digital sensors have higher resolution than film, especially when measuring luminance only.

The longer answer is that those sensors are incredibly expensive and lose some degree of spacial resolution when it comes to colour data specifically, due to having to use a colour filter array over an inherently monochrome sensor and then de-mosaicing the result into a colour image. There's also the tradeoff for film ISO versus grain size, which (mostly, in a lies-to-children kind of way) means that the gap between film & digital increases as the amount of available light goes down.

Of course, you can also use an 8"x10" large format film camera to capture an effective 600 megapixel image, which digital cannot compete with.

There's about 9 other questions to answer before you can get anywhere near the "more resolution" question.

I stopped photography as a hobby once Adobe Lightroom became subscription only. Maybe there is something better out there now...

I enjoyed the whole process: visiting the landscape, chasing the light, imagining how it would look on the wall, the capture, asset management, processing in Lr, sharing. Its a long process, each piece informs the others. When one part of the chain fell apart, it all fell apart for me.

There are non-subscription alternatives, though they differ from lightroom. I quite like Exposure[0] and although I haven't used the desktop version of RAW Power[1] its ipad app is quite good.

[0] https://exposure.software [1] https://www.gentlemencoders.com/

Try Rawtherapee

Reply on news.ycombinator.com