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Comment by 93po | Hacker News Reader

What qualifies as the longest exposure ever? Does it have to result in a photo of something distinguishable? Surely there's an old camera out there with a broken shutter that's been exposing some piece of film for decades, even though it's just an entirely exposed piece of film at this point

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Key word is 'known'. The people who write uni press releases must get good at weasel words.

Looks like the photographer only said "It could be one of, if not the, longest exposures in existence", and they took it from there

I don’t think ‘known’ really qualifies as a “weasel word” in this context. To me, “weasel word” is a somewhat wishy-washy or putatively unnecessary qualifier designed to weaken a statement in a way that allows the statement to be phrased in a way that seems much stronger. “Dozens of supporters” meaning “25 people” is weaselly; “virtual unanimity” instead of “99.9% support” is not always weaselly (though it could be depending on the context); “largest known in the observable universe” instead of “the largest we’ve happened to spot in a telescope” is not at all weaselly.

In this context: “are you sure it’s the longest long-exposure in the world? Have you checked every single camera or device that employs a camera obscura technique?” isn’t a very reasonable objection. And “known” isn’t a weasel word so much as a tautological qualifier. It doesn’t weaken the statement in anyway, it just clarifies that the author is not ominiscient.

If the headline was “believed to be one of the longest” because they were aware of a longer long-exposure, that would be much more weaselly.

One can argue that light degrading a centuries old stone wall counts as a long exposure photograph.

I'm pretty sure I've seen some examples of this but I can't find them now. Besides the better-known pinhole photography, there is also pinspeck photography, and some random object standing in front of the wall could perform the function of the pinspeck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinspeck_camera

(p.s. you seem to be shadowbanned)

> (p.s. you seem to be shadowbanned)

Then how can you see and reply to my post?

Because I vouched for it first (requires some amount of karma I think).

Is this a normal thing for new accounts?

I really can't think of what I did to deserve a shadow ban.

From what I gather, there are some anti-abuse filters that can sometimes affect otherwise good accounts. When this happens, the best thing to do is vouch for the comments you think are good and contact the mods using the Contact link in the footer.

This reminded me of the “nuclear silhouettes” or “human shadow of death”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone

This just sent me down such a rabbit hole. Photo-light and graphs-drawing, like, at the risk of sounding like a stoned teenager : i was extrapolating from your comment in my head to like isn’t everything from our skin tone to the natural colors where we live in a sense photography. A very nice brain vacation on a Saturday morning quarantined on a grey rainy day

Related, there likely is a forgotten structure somewhere that worked as camera obscura for decades; perhaps a dark room with a single bullet hole in the wall, forgotten since World War 2.

Would be interesting if we ever found such a case where a discernible image got burned on the wall.

I would say a fully exposed piece of film is not really a photograph any more, or perhaps we can discard it as a "trivial" case.

On the other hand, there is certainly a surveillance camera somewhere quietly humming along for way longer than this, and you could make a photograph by simply averaging all the video frames.

> On the other hand, there is certainly a surveillance camera somewhere quietly humming along for way longer than this, and you could make a photograph by simply averaging all the video frames.

Sure, but that's a different thing, even if the effect is similar.

* known to humankind? * successfully developed?

They don't know for sure. From the article:

>It could be one of, if not the, longest exposures in existence.

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