Picture a Day: Sep 29

It's very sad that the phone cameras people use today would not by default expose this scene like this. Instead, it would use the ever-present computational photography to boost the shadows and make the image as bright as possible so that you could see the entirety of the couch also. What's even sadder is that not only is it hard to override the camera settings to even approach something like this, but also people's photographic taste is being reshaped by overly HDR images, such that they might think this image is exposed wrong, or at the very least, they wouldn't appreciate the dynamic range in this image and want to re-edit it to be brighter.

Yes, I know I'm starting to sound like a person yelling, "get off my lawn," and "kids these days," but I don't care. Computational photography at first felt like magic, helping people to take better night shots and tweaking exposure and ISO to capture shots that would otherwise be pretty blurry and hopeless to recover in post, and it's become an over-HD and over-HDR monster. I hope that the small renaissance of older digicams helps correct this direction towards unnatural HDRed photos and flat looks, but so far I see the major phone manufacturers still HDRing it up. Even Apple! I would've thought their strongly opinionated, taste-making tendencies wouldn't bow to the trends of Samsung, Google, and other Android manufacturers, but here we are. 🤦‍♀️