Comment by ruminasean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ruminasean | Hacker News Reader

I’m a professional photographer, for whatever that’s worth. Mostly it’s relevant because I have a camera in my hands all day for most of the week. I’m not a gadget guy, I don’t need the latest and greatest, but when I pick up new gear I want it to do the thing and do it well and to not need to be replaced within a few years because it’s completely obsolete.

I picked up an iPhone 11 pro last week, upgrading from a 7. The camera really is great. What I keep thinking is that I’m finding it creepy. I’m not a luddite by any means, I’m all for innovation….I shoot with a Sony mirrorless camera as my main everyday, that felt to me like a massive change.

I think what gets to me is I don’t know exactly what the iPhone camera is doing. When I press the “shutter button,” what exactly is happening? How many shots is it taking? Is it shooting on all three lenses? Is it recording audio even when I have Live Photo turned off? If I think I’m intentionally leaving something I don’t want to record out of the frame, how can I be sure that one of the other lenses isn’t also recording and including it? I just don’t feel like I’m sure about any of it anymore, with all the processing I hear about it doing, layering multiple shots together, shooting outside the frame. The tech is cool and all and I’m not prone to paranoia, but I just keep wondering.

If it makes good photos, and the extra information isn’t being harvested to track you like Facebook would do, what does it matter what it’s actually doing under the hood? It probably is doing a lot of that because it can condense all that extra information into a picture that looks better to humans. But the tech of how it reaches that really shouldn’t matter or be creepy, it’s just processing a bunch of pixels to make something look nice. Just like your mirrorless camera, but with more frames put together to make the final result.

An example is, if the extra data is retained to improve post-processing capabilities, for example refocusing or a slight change in perspective, then you could inadvertently share files with more information than you think they contain. Remember the story of people cropping out their naked bottom half just to have it plain in the exif thumbnail.

This is definitely one example of my thinking.

That is typical apple.

I felt EXACTLY like that using my first mac coming from unix. Apple hides things and I never quite knew what was going on under the hood.

But now it is like 1000x that. Run "ps -ef" on the command line from macos and wonder. I have 311 processes running. What is dprivacyd or com.apple.geod or photoanalysisd or ProtectedCloudKeySyncing?

With photography I feel your pain. Everything is amazing, but at the same time really dumbed down. You don't need to know how Ansel Adams zone system, but... you don't know exactly what is going on and you have little control. Sometimes you need white balance or manual exposure or manual focus or control over the shutter speed, or a real shutter button.

sigh.

On Ubuntu I have 330 processes running.

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