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Comment by great_psy | Hacker News Reader

In a way this says something about human brains.

Presumably both people took many pictures of many waves that day, but somehow both of them decided that this is the one that is the best from that trip.

As humans we share a similar metric for beauty. I find this idea simultaneously obviously and amazing.

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This is ultimately a study in bias and how we choose to take pictures of the same things.

I once stopped my car (in the middle of the city) to take a photo of an old, bright red truck over the crest of a steep hill. The woman who lived in the house I parked in front of asked if it was a class assignment, because several people had apparently stopped that afternoon to do the same. I thought that more beautiful than the photo itself.

It also tells us sometimes we fail to see the beauty around us.

Or maybe it says that we all see the beauty around us, but we don't notice everyone else seeing it, too. (More than one person stopped, but only two people knew that.)

Why only two? In fact, several of those who stopped to take the picture were also informed by a neighbour (each time a different one) that others had taken the same picture before.

At least if the woman in the house was good at forgetting and asked everyone if it was a class assignment? :-)

In fact? How do you know that?

Does worry me sometimes that people just make those statements that they seemingly must believe but have no basis in reality.

I would assume the _reason_ the picture is being taken is the primary driver of that bias, and in this case, they're both professional photographers with similarly nice equipment and public portfolios that are involved in creating income for them.

Plus, the picture obscures it, but you can see the waves coming for a good distance. You'd expect two drummers to be on beat without much difficulty.

My dad and another photographer took the same picture of the same bird, a crane, at the same time and the same spot. Ibsaw both of them, and they are exacly the same. Both only discovered that after having run into each other again the same day on a different spot. They had quite a few outings together since then.

Fun fact, over a year later my dad and I had almost the same experience at the same spot shooting geese in flight. Judging by the angle, we were maybe just shy of a half a second or so appart. Maybe we should look at EXIF data to be sure!

Seems this stuff happens more often then people think.

I remember being struck by this when Microsoft Research first started releasing their photosynth technology, some of the demos showed raw flickr dumps for certain large cities, and there were massive clusters of photos around the most famous tourist bits. In fact, the technology somewhat relied on this overlap.

Bias as in training? Photographers are trained to pick the most interesting subjects, perspectives, and moments.

Waves like this have a clear peak when they stop rising, but before they fall, so there is a natural moment to click the shutter.

I think rather than "a similar metric for beauty" that the art of taking photos for retouching and posting on the internet for strangers is such a generally stale and predictable form.

I'm a visual artist and I'm so over the standard "internet photographer" look. Who takes pictures of lighthouses? It's so boring.

It's always people in the same demographic doing it, too. Give me some variety. Formulaic art is uninspiring.

Claiming that only unique or original things are good is toxic to growth and the development of culture.

Saying "who takes pictures of lighthouses" is like saying "who writes their own [editor/operating system/firewall/whatever], there are already dozens of great ones".

People get better by doing, and if they never did anything that had already been done they'd never be any good at all.

Besides, Lighthouses are cool and pictures of them are pleasant.

It's the same demographic that builds an abandonware single user text editor as a hobby that takes the 400th identical photo of a new england lighthouse.

As a middle aged white guy myself (who codes and makes visual art) I am constantly reminding myself of the context in which my creations exist and reminding myself to actually be creative when doing so.

The millionth photo of something out of the Uffizi with an expensive camera and lens are not things I tend to publish. They're vacation photos, not art.

These photos are independent works of art. They take skill to select the angle, to set up your equipment, and to be ready in the moment. They are absolutely art.

A lot of wedding photos look a lot like other wedding photos. That doesn't make them not art or not worthwhile.

Someone trying to exactly recreate a shot may not be art (trying to find exactly where Ansel was, etc.) but can still be a solid technical exercise in developing skills.

This is not that - it's two people creating something new and independently who happened to have similar results.

It’s like Fry said: “ Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.”

You’re right, but no one likes to be told their taste is banal. And that’s like 80% of the population.

"Who takes pictures of lighthouses? It's so boring."

Claiming that a particular subject is boring is extremely uninspired. For example, landscape photography is "boring", but aren't Ansel Adams's photos creative and high art? Didn't Van Gogh take landscape painting, a very old subject, and elevate it?

I could just as well claim that taking photos of people is boring - It's been done a billion times before. Reducing a work of art to just the subject seems to miss the point of what art is.

Ngl I actually see this as a condemnation of photography. It means that peoples notions of what’s beautiful is kinda stale and static.

burst mode makes this a lot less improbable

"we were both recording a video at 7 frames per second from the same location and are surprised one of the frames were the same"

but yes other parts of this are quite coincidental, except the Canon supremacy.

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