The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming

Nope... but it was featured prominently on the link I did post.

I think I've said enough about landscape already in the other thread LOL.

However... it's all part of the same subject... loosely.... photography after photography.. which incidentally is the title of a really great book

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Photography-after-Memory-Representation-Digital/dp/9057011018

Seeing as you've linked to it though, THIS is what landscape looks like now, and this is why conventional landscape doesn't get a look in any more.. because this is far more interesting and relevant.
 
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I'll read your link later.
I'm not convinced by this 'after photography' stuff myself. I don't see there being a distinct break, more a shift. And I'm not even sure of that. Steve McCurry has said ( current issue of Professional Photography) that he doesn't see any difference between film and digital.

I've got work to do today. So will have to come back to this later...:(
 
Ed Sutton said:
I'll read your link later.
I'm not convinced by this 'after photography' stuff myself. I don't see there being a distinct break, more a shift. And I'm not even sure of that. Steve McCurry has said ( current issue of Professional Photography) that he doesn't see any difference between film and digital.

I've got work to do today. So will have to come back to this later...:(
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I think it's not the technical differences alone that are making people rethink. For me it's the pervasiveness of imagery now. It's certainly making me think of imagery in a different way, and others too.

Read the book I linked to if you get a chance.
 
I found the article very interesting, and will need to ponder it more I think..... especially when I think along the lines of.... 'everyone's a photographer' nowadays.
The article talks about 'computational photography'... and then follows with "Except in photojournalism, there will be no such thing as a ‘straight photograph’; everything will be an amalgam, an interpretation, an enhancement or a variation –either by the photographer as auteur or by the camera itself"

Certain bits in the article made me think about a book I'd been reading titled 'The photography reader' by Liz Wells, and a paragraph in it , "... in what ways might photography preempt interpretation...?, and another paragraph that follows on that says " More recently, philosophers have questioned whether we can distinguish between the world as experienced directly... and the world as represented to us..."
 
Pookeyhead said:
http://time.com/4003527/future-of-photography/?xid=fbshare


Discuss
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I found it a very annoying article. It was full of overblown rhetorical analogies intended to impress but which didn't advance the argument. I was often unsure whether the writer properly understood the technical details of what he was talking about, or had just got carried away by his grandiloquence. There are some interesting points in there, such as where to draw the line in image processing of photography with claims to presenting an accurate "unmanipulated" representation of the visual reality of being there at that time. I like to argue that not only should things not in the scene be added, or things in the scene be removed, but that the definition of things seen in an image be expanded to include the implication of off image light sources. Shadows tell us where the sun was. No post processing addition of extra handy little light beams illuminating the originally datkly shadowed faces of people, for example.

I'd like to agree with some of the points he was waving theatrically at, but am so annoyed by his vague and often misleading thespian dramatics that I should probably calm down first.

But duty calls. No doubt more later :-)
 
I found the article quite cogent and penetrating in various aspects. But an image has always been an image - a representation - (think film grain for example), even as our eyes and brains themselves interpret what we see. Meanwhile we also dream, and for practical purposes need to distinguish dreaming from everyday 'reality'.
 
Pookeyhead said:
...
Discuss
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Not really sure there is much to discuss ... nothing new in that article as far as I can see, the last image was in fact made in 2003 for example - just seems to be a "What can we fill a page with" type article. Not your usual thought provoking challenge David :)
 
PaulButler said:
Not really sure there is much to discuss ... nothing new in that article as far as I can see, the last image was in fact made in 2003 for example - just seems to be a "What can we fill a page with" type article. Not your usual thought provoking challenge David :)
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Not even the idea that data itself can become an art form.. in all the multitude of ways it can be rendered visually and beyond the realms of what we would consider "photography"?
 
You only need so many conventional images of Glencoe and Saltburn Pier.
We already see increasing use of the medium to create what amounts to impressionistic art.
 
Pookeyhead said:
Not even the idea that data itself can become an art form.. in all the multitude of ways it can be rendered visually and beyond the realms of what we would consider "photography"?
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In many ways I already consider taking an image as a data gathering exercise particularly in respect of trying to get the best possible "data" in camera. I'm not well versed in art per se, but I have seen plenty of digital "art" over the last 10 or more years. Some, perhaps most, of that art was purely decorative but some would not have been.
 
Pookeyhead said:
I think it's not the technical differences alone that are making people rethink. For me it's the pervasiveness of imagery now. It's certainly making me think of imagery in a different way, and others too.
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All the proliferation of images does is create noise. I don't see how it alters the way images operate.

Pookeyhead said:
Read the book I linked to if you get a chance.
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I'll try to get hold of it. Ta.

The TIME article is a bit of a non-article IMO.

"But forces beyond photography and traditional publishing are already onto this new data resource, and culture will move with it whether photographers choose to follow or not."

You can choose to embrace this new multi-media/multi-technology thing that's not photography, or you can continue using photography in ways in which it has always been used. Why aren't we all making videos? Our cameras can do it easily enough but there's something we find still photographs have which moving ones don't. I think it's the fact that they don'[t change which forces us to consider them more deeply. Moving images are fleeting, changing. You have to make an effort to rewind and re-watch. A photography is just there.

Photography isn't over, there's just something different being created.
 
Ed Sutton said:
All the proliferation of images does is create noise. I don't see how it alters the way images operate.



I'll try to get hold of it. Ta.

The TIME article is a bit of a non-article IMO.

"But forces beyond photography and traditional publishing are already onto this new data resource, and culture will move with it whether photographers choose to follow or not."

You can choose to embrace this new multi-media/multi-technology thing that's not photography, or you can continue using photography in ways in which it has always been used. Why aren't we all making videos? Our cameras can do it easily enough but there's something we find still photographs have which moving ones don't. I think it's the fact that they don'[t change which forces us to consider them more deeply. Moving images are fleeting, changing. You have to make an effort to rewind and re-watch. A photography is just there.

Photography isn't over, there's just something different being created.
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I think that's what it's saying though. It's not over no... that's just a headline grabbing title, but the closing statements certainly echo true. That photography as we know it is not dead... certainly not, but it has left the building to some extent.

I didn't post it because it's saying anything revolutionary, but it is in keeping with the more active discussion threads on here at the moment. Its not just about moving image... the whole idea of images as data does open up some new and interesting possibilities though... ones that couldn't have existed in the analogue age of photography.

Even the rejection of digital is an evolution in a way, because no one prior to the digital age sought to reject what's current. In the analogue age, you never had photographers and artists striving to reject the processes of the day, because it was the ONLY process.. now we are overwhelmed by it, and everything seemingly has been done, and done so publicly and prolifically, we seek something else.
 
I don't think I understand this idea of 'images as data'. Surely images have always been data (information)? Aren't we just adding more than the image to the data?

One aspect of embedded GPS coordinates that I have found interesting (and amusing) is in the fishing world I inhabit. Some anglers are very secretive about where they catch big fish from, but they also like to have their egos massaged by putting photos on forums - sometimes with digitally altered backgrounds. A few times I've opened the file, found the GPS coordinates and posted a map pinpointing where the fish was caught. I guess that's an image as data! :D

I see where you are coming from with the rejection of digital in favour of analogue as an interesting effect of digital proliferation, but I think that's a small set of people in a select field of photography who are simply striving to differentiate themselves from the mainstream. When it comes to rejecting new media there are plenty of painters who have rejected acrylic paint in favour of old fashioned oils.

As far as photography goes I think a lot depends on what area you work in and how you present your images as to how digital affects your working practice.
 
Pookeyhead said:
In the analogue age, you never had photographers and artists striving to reject the processes of the day, because it was the ONLY process..
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I'm sure there were wet plate collodion photographers before digital who shunned dry film. But we didn't have the internet then so we wouldn't have known about them!


Steve.
 
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Steve Smith said:
I'm sure there were wet plate collodion photographers before digital who shunned dry film. But we didn't have the internet then so we wouldn't have known about them!


Steve.
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The end result is still a focused optical image on a light sensitive medium though. Now... the end result is data. We only CHOSE to represent it as a conventional photographic image, but it can be manipulated or presented however you like.
 
surely every image has always been data though .. and although most of us chose to print our negatives/slides conventionally there have always been other options. The only difference is now the data is digital in nature ... but even prior to the DSLR revolution we had the option of scanning prints or slides
 
Is this similar to a common technique employed by cryptographers who "hide" data within digital images (e.g. some elements of Cicada 3301)?

Edit: "Steganography" is the word I was looking for.
 
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Ed Sutton said:
I don't think I understand this idea of 'images as data'. Surely images have always been data (information)? Aren't we just adding more than the image to the data?
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Like so many things that have become "data", it is about granularity, a digital image has pixel level data, a wet-process photograph is arguably data but as a single "lump" for a given image, so the digitised version can be manipulated at a completely different level.

The article does seem to me to be another of a long stream of "will new tech X kill off old tech W" and I wonder if many of these things are created by journos with a deadline but stuck for an idea
Pookeyhead said:
That photography as we know it is not dead... certainly not, but it has left the building to some extent.
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I agree but this is the reality of pretty much all new technology, we use email but still post letters, we use mobile phones but still use land lines, we text but still speak.It is all just more tools in the toolbox, it is additive not substitution.

I was struck by the lack of mention in the article of truly different technologies such as light-field cameras which are about capturing a whole new level of data from a scene and seem to me to have the potential to make the kind of changes to photography that the article alludes to.
 
Pookeyhead said:
Not even the idea that data itself can become an art form.. in all the multitude of ways it can be rendered visually and beyond the realms of what we would consider "photography"?
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The idea of data becoming an art form is as old as the oldest science. Since computers become fast enough and displays complex enough to give birth to experimental computational mathematics we've had animated graphs and maps, the Mandelbrot set, etc.. Now some universities run courses in data visualisation, methods of inventing interesting images from complex data sets which allow research scientists to add the formidable computational power of the human visual cortex to the toolkit with which they're trying to find clues about important underlying generalisations behind the data.

A particularly interesting use of these methods has recently arisen in the new field of deep complex adaptive neural nets. These attempt to use a simplified abstraction of the human brain to solve complex problems beyond the reach of traditional mathematics. They have become smart enough to start doing useful image analysis and recognition. Some Flickr users may have noticed Flickr has recently started generating automatic descriptive tags for their photographs. A big problem with complex neural nets which succeed in solving problems is that they're so complex it's impossible to understand how they're doing it, if you like what's going on in this working fragment of an artificial mind.

When the "artificial mind" has somehow succeeded in recognising faces, dogs, hammers, etc., in photographic images there is a visually interesting way of finding out what it's "thinking" -- coax it into hallucinating or "dreaming" images which we can then look at.

This kind of thing does raise lots of interesting deep questions about the nature of representation, photography, art, human visual perception, and so on. But they're very far from being new questions, and recent decades decades have seen an explosion of relevant science, such as the uses now being made of many kinds of detailed live scans of the brains of people looking at images.
 
Speaking of neural networks, it's fascinating what Google's neural network, Deep Dream, makes of images and video.

Anyone with a hangover best avoid watching this video. :D

 
Who needs to go outside, get cold and wet, get aching muscles or fly across the world when you can just use this
http://planetside.co.uk/

(Image generators built on mathematics)

But then - where is the fun. 3d landscape generators have been around for years, admittedly only the last few years have seen the computational power to generate more realistic versions and Im sure in the next 10 years, they'll probably be generated on-the-fly and we'll all be in "coffins" experiencing the wonderful "matrix" style world.

I prefer reality myself.
 
chris malcolm said:
When the "artificial mind" has somehow succeeded in recognising faces, dogs, hammers, etc., in photographic images there is a visually interesting way of finding out what it's "thinking" -- coax it into hallucinating or "dreaming" images which we can then look at.
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I got one to reinterpret one of my pictures:

48de1289-b93f-400b-949a-259139cb17d6 by Tim Garlick, on Flickr

I must admit my puny mind hadn't seen elephants and Yorkshire terriers in that shot. Maybe when we get to the point where we can replace critics with computers, then there will be a real revolution.
 
it has always been difficult if not impossible to predict future trends in Art.
For the most part Photography, even in its loosest forms, has followed rather than led.
It is even difficult to define what is the current state in Art, as it usually emerges on to the scene from the least likely places, fully blown and thriving. The art establishment itself is a very poor barometer and usually fails to recognise new successful trends from amongst all the new that is destined to fails.

The discussion of "New" photography, is just that, Discussion. It is true that digital experimentation is the order of the day. But none of us can say for sure what will find a place, and what will not. I for one can not say at all what the New will turn out to look like or represent. Or what will end as a blind alley.
There seems to be just as much banal new as banal traditional.
 
Pookeyhead said:
[...]

Even the rejection of digital is an evolution in a way, because no one prior to the digital age sought to reject what's current. In the analogue age, you never had photographers and artists striving to reject the processes of the day, because it was the ONLY process.. now we are overwhelmed by it, and everything seemingly has been done, and done so publicly and prolifically, we seek something else.
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"
"... no one prior to the digital age sought to reject what's current"? Really? What about those writers who insisted on using fountain pens long after most writers were using typewriters? What about the later general rejection of the "cheating" optical aids to perspective drawing popularised in the Renaissance? What about that early British landscape photographer, noted for the wide dynamic range between sun and shadow in his prints, who lamented the increasing difficulty of finding good second hand lenses with bubbles in the optical glass when optical glass technology improved? He relied on the bubbles to reduce the otherwise uncapturable dynamic range of his sunlit countryside photographs. Can anyone remember his name?
 
chris malcolm said:
The idea of data becoming an art form is as old as the oldest science.
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The idea is, yes.

chris malcolm said:
Now some universities run courses in data visualisation, methods of inventing interesting images from complex data sets which allow research scientists to add the formidable computational power of the human visual cortex to the toolkit with which they're trying to find clues about important underlying generalisations behind the data.
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NOW they do, yes.



chris malcolm said:
A particularly interesting use of these methods has recently arisen in the new field of deep complex adaptive neural nets. These attempt to use a simplified abstraction of the human brain to solve complex problems beyond the reach of traditional mathematics. They have become smart enough to start doing useful image analysis and recognition. Some Flickr users may have noticed Flickr has recently started generating automatic descriptive tags for their photographs. A big problem with complex neural nets which succeed in solving problems is that they're so complex it's impossible to understand how they're doing it, if you like what's going on in this working fragment of an artificial mind.
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Yup!.... but I'm talking about photography exclusively here - as in where what we call still image photography will be heading. I don't believe I, or the article has suggested data being put to creative uses is new, because it's not.

The posts by Zone V and Timmy G are not really what I had in mind either. They're just manipulations of "conventional" digital images. I'm more fascinated by how data can be used in a more abstracted way. I once did a project years ago that kind of heads in the direction I was imagining. It used glitching, which has since become a bit of a cliché these days, but I asked people to tell me a secret, or a sin, or something they were ashamed of. I then loaded the JPEGs in a text editor, and typed the words into the middle of the file. The resulting glitch was therefore their words.... their secret or shameful act acting directly on the data. It was about shame and corruption. It was quite interesting.

Then there's the whole issue of computational photography which seems to have gone under the radar lately. Probably because the cameras are aimed at the consumer (despite being pricey). As soon as a serious camera aimed at the enthusiast is released though, imagine the uproar that will cause, and the resulting backlash.. then truly, the democratisation of the technical process is complete. The ONLY thing left soon to separate the good from the bad, will be the subject and concept behind the work. When you can focus, adjust exposure, depth of field, crop... everything post shoot, then apart from studio lighting, there will be no skills left to learn. When truly high quality imagery is capable by anyone, with no training at all, where's the amateur going to get his/her kudos from then?

chris malcolm said:
When the "artificial mind" has somehow succeeded in recognising faces, dogs, hammers, etc., in photographic images there is a visually interesting way of finding out what it's "thinking" -- coax it into hallucinating or "dreaming" images which we can then look at.
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That however, sounds interesting.


chris malcolm said:
This kind of thing does raise lots of interesting deep questions about the nature of representation, photography, art, human visual perception, and so on. But they're very far from being new questions, and recent decades decades have seen an explosion of relevant science, such as the uses now being made of many kinds of detailed live scans of the brains of people looking at images.
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I know... but again, that's not the actual image your cameras are producing right now, in your hands, or even in the near future. All manner of big data gathering has immense possibilities if you ponder it, but what intrigues me about this article is what could actually be done with what we have now... every time we press the shutter. It's certainly given me many ideas I can experiment with any way, even if it hasn't done so for anyone else :)
 
Pookeyhead said:
The posts by Zone V and Timmy G are not really what I had in mind either. They're just manipulations of "conventional" digital images. I'm more fascinated by how data can be used in a more abstracted way. I once did a project years ago that kind of heads in the direction I was imagining. It used glitching, which has since become a bit of a cliché these days, but I asked people to tell me a secret, or a sin, or something they were ashamed of. I then loaded the JPEGs in a text editor, and typed the words into the middle of the file. The resulting glitch was therefore their words.... their secret or shameful act acting directly on the data. It was about shame and corruption. It was quite interesting.
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What you did there David sounds exactly what I mentioned earlier - steganography.
 
chris malcolm said:
"
"... no one prior to the digital age sought to reject what's current"? Really? What about those writers who insisted on using fountain pens long after most writers were using typewriters? What about the later general rejection of the "cheating" optical aids to perspective drawing popularised in the Renaissance? What about that early British landscape photographer, noted for the wide dynamic range between sun and shadow in his prints, who lamented the increasing difficulty of finding good second hand lenses with bubbles in the optical glass when optical glass technology improved? He relied on the bubbles to reduce the otherwise uncapturable dynamic range of his sunlit countryside photographs. Can anyone remember his name?
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Nope.... afraid I can't, but it's probably going to bug me from now on.

I'm talking about rejecting the very basis of the medium itself. Besides, a writer rejecting a fountain pen is not rejecting the current... it's merely hanging onto the past. Someone being all fetishist over a lens is not what I'm talking about either. I'm talking about prior to digital, all photography was the result of a chemical process... light focused on a sensitive material, and chemically developed in some way to make it permanent - essentially, it could be argued they were all the same. Apart from the lens part, we now have two main ways (and many other indirect ways) of doing the same thing - not only that, they now challenge the very nature of the medium. They make it uncertain, and difficult to predict due to how quickly digital technologies can develop, and more importantly, diverge. It makes you question what you see more. Also, being digital, the merging of analogue derived images (in this case I mean collected with a lens) and wholly synthetic ones are are closer than they ever were, and often hard to tell apart.

I don;t think there are any true parallels between this and past developments in a slow changing industry that pretty much stayed the same for over a century and a half. Sure, film got faster, lenses got faster, auto focus, motor drives.. stuff happened, but it was essentially the same despite that. We're on the verge of real change though. In many ways it's here, but it's clear to anyone that trying to predict the next 20 years will be far more difficult than it would have been 50 years ago.
 
ZoneV said:
What you did there David sounds exactly what I mentioned earlier - steganography.
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Kind of, but isn't that the method of HIDING a message inside another medium? It's pretty obvious the images I produced had been ****ed up LOL.
 
The next revolution is coming? I won't believe it when I see it... ;)
 
"Digital capture quietly but definitively severed the optical connection with reality, that physical relationship between the object photographed and the image that differentiated lens-made imagery and defined our understanding of photography for 160 years. The digital sensor replaced to optical record of light with a computational process that substitutes a calculated reconstruction using only one third of the available photons. That’s right, two thirds of the digital image is interpolated by the processor in the conversion from RAW to JPG or TIF. It’s reality but not as we know it."

What a crock of s..t or as someone else put it rather better...

chris malcolm said:
I found it a very annoying article. It was full of overblown rhetorical analogies intended to impress but which didn't advance the argument...
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Drivel.
 
woof woof said:
"Digital capture quietly but definitively severed the optical connection with reality, that physical relationship between the object photographed and the image that differentiated lens-made imagery and defined our understanding of photography for 160 years. The digital sensor replaced to optical record of light with a computational process that substitutes a calculated reconstruction using only one third of the available photons. That’s right, two thirds of the digital image is interpolated by the processor in the conversion from RAW to JPG or TIF. It’s reality but not as we know it."

What a crock of s..t or as someone else put it rather better...
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Kind of true though... the bayering doesn't use light efficiently.

You're kind of missing the point of the article though and being distracted by a bit of technical pedantry. The article suggests that not only will a "straight" photo be a thing of the past because it will be so inherently processed automatically (it already is in fact), but that no one will want that (already very nearly a fact) and we'll stop recognising reality the same way we do now. It is not a technical article.. it's discussing a future where reality is well and truly dead. It alludes to something I've been saying as well, which is no one wants reality any more. We reject it in photos these days and think a real photograph is dull. As more and more control over how the data is presented becomes available, the more we seek to evade reality at every step. With that in mind, how long before cameras are incapable of recording reality because it will be designed out? Just a thought.
 
Pookeyhead said:
The article suggests that not only will a "straight" photo be a thing of the past because it will be so inherently processed automatically (it already is in fact)
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I think you have to give the technicians a bit more credit. You (or perhaps I should say "the article") make it sound as though technology is being developed to produce photographs that don't represent reality and I don't think that's the case. If anything I would say technology is getting better at capturing reality (with better dynamic range of sensors as a prime example), and there are still plenty of people who want to capture the truth. I fully agree there is a deluge of unrealistic images being published nowadays, but these are primarily through choice of the photographer after the fact. I think this equates to a current trend (and perhaps users getting to grips with the new technology available to them) rather than an inescapable drive towards something away from reality. The current trends will drive technology to a certain extent (most consumer cameras come with a choice of inbuilt filters nowadays) but it's still a conscious decision as to whether or not to use them. At some point opinion may well switch and these will become seen as gimmicks (if they aren't already) and perhaps these functions will be removed from future technology. If you throw into the mix the amazing leaps forward in virtual worlds, CGI, 3D, immersive environments,etc. reality has a lot to compete with nowadays, but I can't see it lasting. Reality will be popular again at some point (and hopefully sooner rather than later).
 
TimmyG said:
I think you have to give the technicians a bit more credit. You (or perhaps I should say "the article") make it sound as though technology is being developed to produce photographs that don't represent reality and I don't think that's the case. If anything I would say technology is getting better at capturing reality (with better dynamic range of sensors as a prime example), and there are still plenty of people who want to capture the truth. I fully agree there is a deluge of unrealistic images being published nowadays, but these are primarily through choice of the photographer after the fact. I think this equates to a current trend (and perhaps users getting to grips with the new technology available to them) rather than an inescapable drive towards something away from reality. The current trends will drive technology to a certain extent (most consumer cameras come with a choice of inbuilt filters nowadays) but it's still a conscious decision as to whether or not to use them. At some point opinion may well switch and these will become seen as gimmicks (if they aren't already) and perhaps these functions will be removed from future technology. If you throw into the mix the amazing leaps forward in virtual worlds, CGI, 3D, immersive environments,etc. reality has a lot to compete with nowadays, but I can't see it lasting. Reality will be popular again at some point (and hopefully sooner rather than later).
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You have to appreciate I'm talking about the future, and I'm talking mainly about the consumer market. The fact that the majority of consumer images taken on smart phones end up processed as a matter of course, through choice is pointing the way towards cameras that more will see this kind of feature becoming more and more commonplace. Everytime I look at my Facebook feed now, I see images from phones that are clearly processed a long way from reality, and this seems to be the preferred method for most casual smart phone users. There's no reason to suggest that this will not become more and more common, as "real" cameras become less and less used by most people. Only those with an interest in photography seem to have any interest in reality, or dynamic range, or any of the things you've talked about. I'm not sure these effects are seen as a gimmick, as they've been around for a long time now.. as long as Instagram has any way, and show no signs of abating.

Only time will tell of course... none of us can read the future, but there's definitely a wider acceptance in unreality in casual, consumer photography these days.
 
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