Concept camera blocks photos at cliché locations

[Hector Javkin]

<p><a href="http://www.dpreview.com/articles/6851659918/camera-restricta-concept-blocks-photos-of-over-photographed-subjects"><strong>This article</strong></a> in dpreview describes a concept camera which uses a GPS to block photos of subjects that have already been photographed enough. Possibly the concept could be expanded. The camera could do a web search and show you posted photos shot at the location, or could use image recognition to prevent you from photographing subjects which are overdone for reasons other than geography: sunsets over water, ordinary house cats, Ken Rockwell's children, etc.</p>

<p>The user might be allowed to override the restriction, much as browsers often allow us to view what appears to be an untrustworthy site if we are sure we want to do it.</p>

[charles_stobbs3]

This wouldn't seem to be a strong selling point.

[Matt Laur]

<p>Ah, automatic visual grammar checking with a built-in aesthetic scold module that you have to beg to allow you to shoot ironic travel photos. The only thing that would make another piece of technology designed to save people from their own lack of hipster sophistication more amusing would be the establishment of a new government agency to oversee it. The Ministry Of Beauty, perhaps.<br /><br />Will the software allow you to proceed with such photos by default as long as you turn on a retro-film Instagram filter set to either Bleach Bypass or 1970's Cooked Polaroid?</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<blockquote>

<p>subjects that have already been photographed enough</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Since no subject has yet been photographed enough, they've got themselves a flaw in rationale and a bias in perspective.</p>

[bebu_lamar]

<p>What's that app for? May be to make money as stupid apps tend to sell well. </p>

[William Kahn]

<p>An app that blocks iphone selfies with no override option? I'm just sayin' ;-)</p>

[stephen t]

<p>Ken Rockwell's children? LOL, although I can understand the OP's point of view in that regard!</p>

[GerrySiegel]

We need an app that detects purchases that we do not need with voice of a scolding, Lily Tomlin type " Now do you really truly need that lens, you already have seventeen lenses. Take a deep breath and think it over. " " have you contributed to your 401K this year?"

[zave_shapiro]

<p>I worked in a hotel in which one door to the garage was only six feet tall and there was an illuminated sign saying "LOW DOORWAY". Every morning we'd hear a horrible thwack, an exclamation of pain and a dazed guest telling us we should have a sign. It took masterful restraint to avoid stating the obvious, but I'm a master. Cliche blockers, tire pressure monitors and sign thwackers are all reminders that no matter how much we try to make things idiot-proof they just come up with a better idiot.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<blockquote>

<p>Every morning we'd hear a horrible thwack, an exclamation of pain and a dazed guest telling us we should have a sign.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>When what they should have been telling you was to hire a construction crew and make the doorway higher. At some point, no matter how stupid its guests, I wonder if the hotel could be considered an idiot for not trying another approach to the repetitive behavior of its guests.</p>

[Allen Herbert]

<p> "uses a GPS to block photos of subjects that have already been photographed enough"</p>

<p>Perhaps they should block stupid people from being stupid...starting with themselves.<br>

.</p>

[carbon_dragon]

<p>Sounds like the precognitive elevators in Hitchhiker's Guide which refuse requests to go to particular floors depending on what they forsee.</p>

[randrew1]

<p>I once went to an art museum that displayed paintings of Whistler, Monet, and another impressionist whose name escapes me. All three had painted the same location along the Thames in London. Each artist had painted the same scene more than once. Each painting was different as much because of different lighting as different artists techniques. </p>

<p>I've shot more than 100 photos of the lower falls in Rochester. Every one is different. The lighting changes. The season changes. The river level and the resulting spray and rainbows change. </p>

<p>As others have said, there is no limit to the number of photos that can be taken from one location. </p>

[dave_s]

<p>It would be an interesting topic for a separate thread: locations you revisit to photograph again and again. </p>

<p>I take something like <a href="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/17106272-lg.jpg">this photograph</a> every year, when I'm on my spring backpacking trip. The terrain changes, the water changes, the light changes, and I change. You can't step in the same river twice, or arguably, even once.</p>

<p>On the other hand, maybe I need that camera to block me from taking <a href="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/9550706-md.jpg">this one</a>, along with the five other guys with their tripods on the ridge every morning! </p>

[q.g._de_bakker]

You'd almost get the impression that clichés don't exist.

[donald_miller5]

How about naming it The Department of Redundecy Department?

 

Zave, should have asked the guests why they did not drive shorter cars.

[Norma Desmond]

<blockquote>

<p>You'd almost get the impression that clichés don't exist.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Clichés exist alright. To me, this is about whether and how we want to try to avoid them.</p>

[Hector Javkin]

<p> I agree that the idea of limiting ourselves to photos at specific locations is ridiculous, as is my tongue in cheek addition of having the camera decide that other kinds of photographic subjects should be avoided. Who wants a camera designed to tell you what to shoot? Buying such a camera, deciding to give up artistic control to the tool that is supposed to help you work, is crazy. It is altogether different than autofocus and automatic exposure which can be overridden or turned off when desired. The only time a camera should tell you can't shoot is when the battery is dead.</p>

[q.g._de_bakker]

Automatic features have taken off in that big way they have because they do things better than we do. So given that cameras can do things better than we do, the question is not as much whether we should allow a camera to do something (like deciding not to take a particular photo) better than we do, but why we have so much trouble doing it better ourselves.

[Norma Desmond]

<blockquote>

<p>better than we do</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Debatable. Me, I don't think so. Some auto features, sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on the situation. More convenient and easier, when that's the case, still doesn't equate to better. Depends on what one is after both from the process and result.</p>

[q.g._de_bakker]

If convenient and easy are good, more of that is better.<br>When you are after its opposite, no thing is a good thing (not even nothing). But if we would not be after what those automated features bring us and how they deliver, they and the use of them can only be the result of human folly (to put it mildly).<br>Yet i agree that the most important feature of any automation is the option to switch it off. Though it remains that automation exists because it does things better, it's not so that it does things better than everyone.<br>The main question however is why the idea of a cliché-blocking feature arose, why we are rather bad at doing that ourselves (and we indeed are).<br>I would alter the idea though. It is not that we need to be stopped taking yet more pictures of the same old same old. We can want to have our very own load of that. It's the sharing of those clichés that's the problem. Why can't we resist to share, to utter (using whatever medium) what has been said over and over again already?<br>I think there (even) is a good answer to that. The short version of that answer (it's getting late over here, so have to stop for now) is that we're human. Doesn't change it being a problem though.

[Norma Desmond]

<blockquote>

<p>If convenient and easy are good, more of that is better.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>This argument is valid. But that doesn't change the fact that the premise remains debatable. I don't think convenient and easy are necessarily good, which is why I don't think more of either is necessarily better. The "if" is rather powerful! Ease and convenience are generally low down on my own list of things important to my own photography and art. And sometimes they don't apply at all.<br /> <br /> Clichés have a place, in some cases not unlike rituals, which can be of great value. Most family snapshots are a form of cliché, often tied to rituals, and yet I wouldn't give them up and wouldn't want a camera that would block them. While I'm happy to be creative at family functions, people often want simply to see themselves happy, together, and in expected and traditional ways. Same is true of vacation snaps for a lot of people. Also, context can be everything. One might need a cliché picture of Half Dome in a series they were doing, if nothing else than as a baseline from which the others in the series may depart.</p>

[dave_s]

<p>I wonder if the cliches are not so much related to the specific location and subject, but more so of photographic vision, or style. When I lived in the UK a long time ago, we used to deride something called 'RPS style'. It was banal, unthreatening, and very middle-class. The prototype would be a backlit photo of grinning peasants in some Asian country, or a photo of some happy laborer, radiating contentment with his lot in life. I suppose one step down from that would be kittens in teacups, beloved of camera-club photographers.</p>

<p>Now I may have taken that standard photo at Zabriskie Point. But I have never shot kittens in teacups.</p>

[Richard Williams]

<p>I have an app plugged into my web browser that blocks conceptual projects from hipster design students when a defined silliness threshold is exceeded. I would check out the original article, but for some reason I can't access it.</p>

[donald_miller5]

<p>Why would I care how many times something was photographed. If I want to take a picture of something I will take and why would anyone else care or want to purchase such a device? Maybe we can also have a system that will not let you take a bad picture or does not meat certain criteria of different critics?</p>