First off, I have to tell you that this article was inspired by this video. In a lot of Fun Friday articles I will actually embed the video that inspired me, but I’m not doing that this time. Why? Because the truth of the matter is that I didn’t care too much for the video. I thought there were kind of some good points here and there, but it took way too long to get there. I’m not encouraging you to spend time watching it. This is especially true because you could spend that time reading this article.
What is “image quality?”
These days, I shoot images with a pair of 24 megapixel cameras, each with lenses that costs about $300. If I find myself without those, I have my newly minted iPhone 15 which has a triad of the largest lenses I’ve ever seen on a phone. In fact, these are the largest lenses that I hope anyone ever sees on a phone. They’re positively massive and kind of make it hard to even lay the phone down on the charging pad.
My more expensive cameras use 35mm full frame image sensors, and the phone doesn’t. In order to compensate for that, it has a bewildering array of AI-informed processes that adjust color, exposure, and the overall look of the photo. The people at Apple have some sort of idea what I should want my pictures to look like and they use computers to make that happen. If I don’t agree, I can save the photo in raw format and do all the same computational stuff myself, right on the phone.
Whatever device I use to take the photos, they end up on a computer where I use Adobe Photoshop to do whatever I want with them. Many professionals use Lightroom instead, and I have no beef with them for that. The same tools are available in both, and the simple fact is that I started using Photoshop before Lightroom even existed.
The net result of all of this computation and this incredible technology is… a photo of my cat.
But is all that tech and all that baked-in “image quality” even the point? Does the photo above tell any sort of story other than “Stuart has a cat?” That’s the real question.
The dinosaur days
I started taking photos long before most of my coworkers were born. The first camera I had may (or may not) have been called the “Ranger Rick Telephoto Camera Gun.” Now, I’m unable to find an image of it online, and the internet has images of practically everything, so maybe I’m misremembering the name. But at any rate it was a plastic toy camera for kids that shot real film and had a big (cheap) telephoto lens.
Edit: Thanks to readers who have pointed out that the toy was called the “Ready Ranger Tele-photo Camera Gun” and it looked like this:
When I first started shooting more seriously, I borrowed a Nikon camera that looked something like this:
I know it was a Nikon and it had a chrome strip across the top like that. It might not have been this exact model. I also know it had a 35mm prime (non-zoom) lens. I shot a kind of film called Tri-X Pan which surprisingly you can still get today. It was cheap black-and-white film that made everything look grainy and gritty. I developed that film myself with chemicals and lights and since I wasn’t super good at it, I’m sure the photos looked pretty bad.
I have maybe three photos I took back then, and each is more valuable than any 1,000 photos I’ve taken in the last five years. They tell a story of a day long past, when I consciously chose to take that photo. Film and chemicals were expensive and I put thought into saving that moment in time. When I look at those photos it puts me into a frame of mind. It creates an emotion within me. It doesn’t matter that the image is grainy and the paper yellowed. If anything, that pulls me back into those days even more.
All the image quality in the world, and all the filters
If I chose to recreate the look and feel of those photos, it wouldn’t be hard. Certainly any photo I take today has enough quality. I can manipulate it any way I want. I can add filters, grain, even a stained brown background. But that’s not a true representation of what I was thinking and feeling when I took the photo. It’s fake. It’s inauthentic.
Like you, I take photos without giving it much thought. And that’s why all the image quality in the world, and all the filters, won’t make my photos as good as they were 40 years ago. Of course that’s not the fault of the technology. There’s nothing stopping me from taking only one-tenth of the photos I take now, and spending more time composing every shot. I’ve just gotten out of the habit.
The biggest problem, I would say, with today’s photos is that I’m not in charge of them. We have all ceded that control to the AI already. As I said I could take raw images and correct them. So could you, depending on your phone. But we have to admit that the computer does a pretty good job automatically giving us an image that’s pleasing and accurate. But the computer adds no point of view. We’ve given up on creating a point of view in our photos, as long as they look good.
The “unintended consequence of democratization”
A very long time ago, a professor of mine used this term, “the unintended consequence of democratization” and it’s stuck in my head. They used it to mean, when something moves out of the realm of experts into everyday use, one problem is that the median quality gets worse. For example, articles were once written exclusively by paid journalists. Today anyone can start a blog. This improves the number of viewpoints (the intended consequence) but the quality of the writing gets worse (the unintended consequence.) The more untrained voices out there, the less quality there is.
That sounds elitist, and I don’t mean it to. Because, when pretty much anyone can tell a story with words or pictures, the world is enriched with an amazing variety of voices. But, you inevitably lose something in the bargain. Whether or not it’s something worth losing… that’s not my decision.
The internet tells me that 1,720,000,000,000 photos were taken last year alone. This article tells me that in 1970, only about 3,000,000,000 photos were taken. We now take about 500 times more photos than they did half a century ago. Most likely, 90% of them are poor quality. But how many will even survive us? How many will be pretty images full of quality but without any voice? Time will tell.
