Excerpt from this article (full of excellent photos!):
With so many devices in so many hands now, the visual landscape has changed greatly, making it a rare event to find oneself in a group of people anywhere in the world and not see at least one of them using a phone. Collected here: a look at that smartphone landscape, and some of the stories of the phones’ owners.
Excerpt from this article:
Every day for more than a year, Joey, a 15-year-old high-school student, has logged on to Instagram and posted the exact same photo of Otis, a cartoon cow from the children’s TV show Back at the Barnyard, to an account that now has almost 30,000 followers.
“For the first couple weeks, the account was only followed by my friends mostly, and a few other people I didn’t know,” said Joey, who, like all the teenagers quoted in this story, asked to be referred to by his first name only. “Over time, it just started to grow crazy amounts of followers, so I started to get committed and continue to run it.”
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“Same photo every day” accounts are a subgenre of interest-based “daily” accounts, dedicated to posting one thing within a set theme every day. But over the past year, they’ve become more popular. “It’s just trendy now,” said Lily, a 19-year-old who posts the same photo of her friend every day.
Excerpt from this article:
Folsom Street Fair, the annual BSDM fair in San Francisco, upset photographers in 2016 with its “Ask First” campaign that asked photographers to receive permission before taking photos of people on the public streets of the fair. This year, the same event organizers have released a warning that compares taking photos without consent to sexual assault.
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At a lab in Finland, a small team of Nvidia researchers recently built a system that can analyze thousands of (real) celebrity snapshots, recognize common patterns, and create new images that look much the same — but are still a little different. The system can also generate realistic images of horses, buses, bicycles, plants and many other common objects.
The project is part of a vast and varied effort to build technology that can automatically generate convincing images — or alter existing images in equally convincing ways. The hope is that this technology can significantly accelerate and improve the creation of computer interfaces, games, movies and other media, eventually allowing software to create realistic imagery in moments rather than the hours — if not days — it can now take human developers.
In recent years, thanks to a breed of algorithm that can learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data, companies like Google and Facebook have built systems that can recognize faces and common objects with an accuracy that rivals the human eye. Now, these and other companies, alongside many of the world’s top academic A.I. labs, are using similar methods to both recognize and create.
Nvidia’s images can’t match the resolution of images produced by a top-of-the-line camera, but when viewed on even the largest smartphones, they are sharp, detailed, and, in many cases, remarkably convincing.
Excerpt from this article:
My head is facing forward, while the rest of me is turned to the side. This is my body’s natural position when I’m at work. It’s playful, yet awkward, yet very awkward. It also offers a glimpse into how efficient I am even when I’m on the clock. Imagine that you’ve just stopped me while I’m on my way to a meeting, and I turn toward you, but only with the body parts I need for talking. My arms are folded to demonstrate that I get things done, and then celebrate by folding my arms.
Excerpt from this article:
One of the major reasons we take photos in the first place is to remember a moment long after it has passed: the birth of a baby, a reunion, a pristine lake. In 2015, I conducted a Bored and Brilliant Project — in which I challenged people to detach from their devices in order to jump-start their creativity — with more than 20,000 listeners of Note to Self (the podcast about technology that I host). When I surveyed the participants, many said they used photos as a “memory aid,” taking pictures of things like parking spots or the label of the hot sauce at a restaurant to buy later. However, every time we snap a quick pic of something, we could in fact be harming our memory of it.
In one study, students were told to take photos of objects at a museum — and they remembered fewer of the overall objects they had photographed.
Check out this slideshow
Excerpt from this article:
The ‘Boyfriends Of Instagram’ page shares hilarious photos of boyfriends going to ridiculous lengths to capture the perfect shot of their girlfriend. From standing on the edge of a hot tub to crouching or even lying down – these boyfriends are the real masters behind all those money shots.
See the video here.
Excerpt from this article:
In a move to save money and contribute to the “winging it” feel, a handful of couples are relying on relatives and friends — their pockets and purses jammed with GoPro cameras, cellphones and mini iPads — to capture the bride taking that nervous breath before she walks down the aisle or the groom hugging his father, tears in their eyes.
“Two years ago, this was a conversation you never would have had,” said David Tutera, a celebrity wedding planner and the host of the TV show “David Tutera’s Celebrations.”
Few are likely to miss the photo assistants holding large reflectors and shouting, “Look here!” But the more casual approach to capturing important wedding moments has had mixed results.
“Everyone we know has an iPhone, and most take beautiful pictures on Instagram, so we knew they’d be fine,” said Samantha Resnik, 33, whose wedding to Mark Edmunds, 43, included a large reception on May 21 at the West End Hall, on upper Broadway. A single photographer, she said, cannot be everywhere at once. “He can’t possibly capture what 175 guests can,” Ms. Resnik said.
In addition to asking guests to use hashtags on Facebook or Instagram to post photos, couples are now relying solely on them to tell a visual story.
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