here's the short version
- when lenses get small enough, diffractive optics comes into play
- this means "image get blurry" and some notion of maximum rendering power
- unless you strap a telescope to a phone, you'll never get a clear picture of the moon
- you cannot "zoom, enhance"
enter computational photography
- let's just throw some content-aware-fill slash stable diffusion to it
- or in simpler terms: run autocomplete and fill in the details
- if you draw a happy face on a blurry moon jpeg, you get a happy face high rez moon pic
- you actually can "zoom, enhance"
sure enough, some people are 100% ok with "make my photo better" technology, they want to just get "more bokeh cream" and smear it across a jpeg.
on the other hand: the people who buy very big telescopes to take photos of the moon are a bit miffed, and the people who spend hours processing raw photographs for tone are also upset, and it's understandable.
who wants to live through a tsunami of low effort garbage drowning out any and all creative works?
it could be worse: at least we have this other algorithm to predict which of the garbage that will gamify the experience of consumption
anyway, aside from the "we are about to witness the endless september of machine generated content" stuff, what strikes me about the computational photography bit is that eventually, your phone will hallucinate your friends faces.
what was once a blurry underexposed group selfie is now a perfectly crisp, well lit image, and maybe it'll randomly insert a family member into the background because that blurry head looks just like your uncle
People have been dropping stock skies into their photos since the days of glass plate, and the concept of photographic authenticity or realism was always sort of a red herring. There is something very funny though about the Eliza of it all, the obfuscation or filtering of the operator’s will to deceive through the supposed agency of machine intelligence.
But an additional source of comedy for me is always, whenever there's new (or in many cases "new") camera tech, there's a flood of anxiety that feels like birds coming home to roost, since photography is, originally, machine-assisted drawing. (The semi-automatic form of which is the camera obscura)
Most technological developments in photography simply make existing practices easier and more accessible to more people. Changes which bring about a categorical change in how photographs are used, or what photographs can mean, are much more scarce. And the size of photographers' feelings about those changes are hardly ever proportional to how categorical those changes are.
I think that what's potentially somewhat categorical about the increasing use of computational photography is that it permits the photographer not to know, or to pretend not to know, what they are doing to the scene. But again, just how different is that from other forms of automation in photography?
I also think it's important to draw a through line between things like the racism of algorithms and the now well-understood racism of color film stocks in their heydey. Mechanical processes of optimization, practiced by industries which exist under racism, capitalism, colonialism, etc., will produce automatic evil. In that case, the villain is not automation per se, but rather the entire structural context in which it takes place.
