Why We Don't Take Good Pictures Anymore

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:02]This is not a pipe. It's the representation of a pipe. And this is not a landscape. It's the picture of a landscape. This is the real landscape.

[00:00:13]Well, actually, this is just a series of pictures, 24 pictures a second to be precise. And the fact that you are not here with me and you can't see the landscape the way I see it as I'm recording this video. This is the crux of what images really are. And I believe we lost something in the way we think and make images. And it really boils down to one question. Should you when looking at a picture see the reality exactly as it appeared in front of the lens or should you see something else?

[00:00:45]To answer this question, we need to understand what images really are and what they've always been up until very recently. Images are a human artifact.

[00:00:56]Ever since the first cave wall paintings, they've represented a way for humans to portray reality in a way that felt true to them. An interpretation of reality that was the product between the perception of the artist and the tools available to produce it. This resulted in images that couldn't possibly be a record of reality, but an abstraction of it. This is true of cavewall art just as much as Flemish paintings that came thousands of years later. Images were not an accurate record of reality, but rather a human interpretation of it.

[00:01:32]Some might say that images ceased to be an abstraction of reality when photography was invented. Because at that point, it was no longer up to the judgment, sensitivity, and craftsmanship of an artist applying pigments to a canvas. Instead, it was that black box that could capture reality exactly as it was. But did it really do that? Well, it doesn't take too much observation to realize that the first images produced by means of photography were pretty far from depicting reality faithfully. In fact, like any technology in its infancy, there were many aspects that needed improvement. Photography, which started on glass and metal plates, eventually shifted to film as its primary medium. And year after year, film stocks got better and better, able to reproduce colors and capture a decent amount of dynamic range. And in the 50s, the engineers at Kodak, led by the researcher David McAdams, performed an experiment, the results of which define the history of photography and cinema for decades to come. They tested for the first time a scene referred film stock.

[00:02:44]Scene referred is a term that was coined decades later, but it essentially means this. Since a color can be measured and assigned a colorometric value, the goal of the scene referred workflow is to translate those values from the scene to their reproduction on a display or when printed or when projected. So they tested for the first time a film stock that when printed could reproduce colors with the same colorometric values as the realworld colors of photographed.

[00:03:15]Amazing, right? This was such a gamecher. Well, not exactly. When the Caucasian skin was presented as accurately as possible, the majority of the judge's eyes, the folks who were there judging the pictures, found it undesirable. Two conclusions are indicated by the diagram in figure 11.

[00:03:34]First, optimum reproduction of skin color is not exact reproduction. The print represented by the point closest to the square exact reproduction is rejected almost unanimously as beefy.

[00:03:48]The range of face colors in the portraits was entirely separate from the range of natural face colors. Therefore, it seems not only quigotic but facious to assume exact reproduction to be the norm or to measure degradation from that basis. Thanks to McAdams, Kodak understood that a picture is not merely a record of reality because exact reproduction was never chosen as the preferred color reproduction. So they became concerned not with colometric accuracy but rather with how humans like to see things. CJ Barlson entered this environment with the mandate to bridge the gap between the realworld appearance and its reproduction when photographed.

[00:04:32]He recognized that photography acts as a surrogate for memory. When a person looks at a photograph, they're not comparing it to the scene which is gone.

[00:04:41]They're comparing it to their internal encoding of that scene. Therefore, the engineering target for Kodak film could not be the physics of the external world. It had to be the psychopysics of the internal one. But set out to map this internal world asking a fundamental question. What is the color of memory?

[00:05:02]Barlson's study involved an experiment that included a variety of observers.

[00:05:08]The experiment was simple yet very powerful. He selected a set of familiar colors. He took the observers, he put them in a viewing booth, but instead of showing them the realworld colors, he presented them with the Monsole book of colors. And he asked them to point to the color chip that best represented the realworld colors that they were asked to identify. The results were quite surprising, but they were not scattered errors. The deviation between the real world color and the memory color was directional and predictable.

[00:05:42]Specifically, memory made colors more saturated, rotated their hues, and increased the overall brightness of reflective surfaces. This research laid the foundation for Kodak to engineer film stocks on a make it look good basis. Again, not concerned with colometric accuracy, but rather with how humans like to see things. All that mattered was creating beautiful art, beautiful pictures. They gave us a system that for decades allowed us to produce incredible imagery until 40 years after that MacAdam's paper, KODC itself threw it all away.

[00:06:23]Yes, they did. Well, maybe it's a little bit too big of a statement, but here's what happened.

[00:06:29]>> Starting now, your photos have the power of television. Introducing the Kodak photo CD.

[00:06:39]>> Your pictures taken with your current film and camera, transferred onto a new kind of compact disc and shown on TV.

[00:06:46]The special >> in the early '9s, they launched the Kodak photo CD system. At the time, the digital takeover was just beginning and the system was meant to ingest and display images from different sources like film negative scans, slide film scans, print scans, and early digital cameras. But there was a problem.

[00:07:06]Switching from a negative scan to a slide film scan to a digital camera capture was jarring because the different mediums had effectively different looks. their solution, a scene referred workflow. If all those mediums could reference the colometric values of the original scene, it would have been possible to virtually eliminate the differences between those mediums or at least make the transition between those a lot less jarring.

[00:07:35]Well, the system was not a huge success, but the logic behind it stickked. In fact, the technical people from camera companies and post-production softwares started adopting the scene referred workflow with the idea that a more accurate pictures that translate the values from the scene to their reproduction on the display equals a better picture. This scene referred workflow doesn't touch only professional cameras. It's literally built in in every camera, smartphone, and editing software out there. Sure, images can still be edited and color graded in the digital domain to steer away from a reality grounded representation, but it's like trying to compensate for a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place. Why give us a reality grounded, colometrically accurate representation when we already established more than 40 years ago that that was not our preferred way of seeing colors. Many photographers and filmmakers understand this maybe even subconsciously and take control over their colors and tones. But many others, passionate filmmakers and photographers don't. And they're left in the dark wondering why their images don't have the same appeal and weight that they should have. But apart from filmmakers and photographers, we are all image makers one way or another. And in the moment in history where we are making producing the most pictures per capita, I think we're also producing the worst pictures. And it's not because we are not able to take pictures anymore, but it's because the technology that allows us to take pictures doesn't take into account what images really are or what images should be an abstraction of reality and not a record of it. There is a reason why this is more interesting than this. One is literal, one's an abstraction. My parents were not photographers, not even interested in arts the slightest. Yet, these were the pictures they used to take on holiday.

[00:09:32]Shot on film and printed on photographic paper. Abstractions of reality that in their simplicity, I believe just look beautiful. Therefore, the CI pas principle is not just art theory. It's the fundamental law of our perception.

[00:09:48]To show the world as a piece of art, we must show it as we remembered it.

[00:09:52]Saturated, shifted, and beautifully untrue. This was all for today. If you like this video, please like, share, and subscribe. And until next time, bye.