[HN Gopher] Lessons in creating family photos that people want t...
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Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep (2018)
Author : mooreds
Score : 354 points
Date : 2025-01-26 23:13 UTC (23 hours ago)
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| dano wrote:
| There was a similar journey for our family after our parents
| passed and indeed, the photos with people doing ordinary things
| are the ones we share and enjoy. The Grand Canyon has a way of
| looking the same now as it did in 1955 and so those photos were
| discarded. Five boxes of photo albums were examined and the
| photos to keep were cut out and sent to be digitized organized by
| year and topic. I am glad someone wrote about their experience
| and the tips that come from having spent examining a life well
| photographed.
| pigcat wrote:
| Just to share my experience: My brother and I recently digitized
| all our family photos. The process doesn't have to be so
| daunting. We found someone on facebook marketplace with a high
| quality scanner, and paid them to scan every photo and put it on
| a USB stick. I don't remember how much it cost but it was pennies
| per photo.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| Not a dig at you but I laughed a bit when reading it.
|
| "it's not hard, just pay someone to do it for you"
|
| I get the sentiment though. I've spent countless of hours
| trying to read up on digitizing our VHS collection while the
| proper thing would've been to just have a company do it for me.
| The main concern for me though is that they might just run the
| most basic settings and I'm telling myself that doing it myself
| will allow me to future proof the format a bit better.
| ghaff wrote:
| Outsourcing video is generally a lot more expensive. Probably
| worth thinking seriously about how much you really want to
| do.
| pigcat wrote:
| Haha, yeah fair point. My comment does seem trite when you
| put it that way ;)
|
| The point I was trying to make (which I think you understood)
| was that it was _surprisingly cheap_ to outsource. In the
| range of ~$100 for our entire collection.
|
| I should mention that this project was undertaken because a
| relative's house burned down and, with it, all their family
| photos. So my comment is meant as encouragement for anyone
| sitting on a treasure trove of family photos who is thinking
| to digitize: do it! And to inform that this process that I
| thought would be very painful/tedious is something that can
| be outsourced for relatively cheap.
| ghaff wrote:
| I agree with most of that.
|
| After doing some in-house scanning I sent a bunch of stuff out.
| At the time, there was a company in CA that put stuff on a pallet
| to India. A bit butt clenching but it was great and I wrote a
| review for CNET where I was in the Blog Network at the time.
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/reviewing-the-result...
|
| Was probably more selective than you. And agree that a lot of the
| day-to-day stuff outside of the house in particular simply wasn't
| recorded. No photos of my mother's chemistry lab for example.
|
| I've thrown a lot of stuff out but could probably get more
| scanned but not sure after looking at it if another pass is
| worthwhile.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| My dad took thousands of photos of us over the years. His big
| rule: every photo should include some family, and some landscape.
| netsharc wrote:
| My startup idea is to put all those rules into an AI-engine and
| feed it my photo collection.
|
| Just kidding..! But damn, a lot of my photos are of the
| scenery...
| raldi wrote:
| This is excellent, though modern cameras (let's be real, phones)
| tagging photos with timestamps and geolocation obviates a few of
| the recommendations.
| bredren wrote:
| iPhone handles face recognition as well. Also memories provide
| automatic collections of note, taking into account view and
| sharing patterns.
|
| I suspect the process of making photos meaningful and surfacing
| gems will continue to improve.
|
| So yes, take certain kinds of photos but more than anything
| capture photos (and video) in highest possible quality when it
| doesn't disrupt experiences.
| barrettondricka wrote:
| I just scrolled through my gallery, and the number of meaningful
| photos I had was zero.
|
| Snapped a photo of my room first thing.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I tend to keep the first picture taken by a new device to be
| that of my daughters. :-)
| bombcar wrote:
| This is something that I find surprisingly hard to locate -
| even in a house with thousands of pictures taken in it, simple
| pictures of how the living room is laid out are rare to non-
| existent. You have to piece together the evidence from other
| photos just to remember how it was.
| esafak wrote:
| Good lessons. If you are using a cell phone, make sure the
| location is recorded.
| aaronax wrote:
| And if you use Nextcloud on Android to back up your photos, it
| may have been not syncing the location since mid-December when
| Google removed certain permissions from the App Store version.
|
| I bit peculiar and specific but came to mind and may save some
| person's geotagging.
| Rygian wrote:
| Not sure to follow. My Nextcloud app on Android doesn't
| require location permission. And its job is not too geo-tag
| photos (that's for the camera app instead), but rather to
| sync whole files.
| aaronax wrote:
| The automatic sync function of the Nextcloud app ends
| accessing the photos in a way that doesn't include the
| location metadata of the photo. So the file it puts on your
| Nextcloud server does not have the location metadata.
|
| https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/14409
|
| Fortunately (I think?) the auto-upload seems to become
| unreliable in general so people are more likely to notice
| that funny things are happening.
| s2l wrote:
| Worth mentioning photoprim, if you maintain photos on local
| hardware, nas, etc.
|
| https://www.photoprism.app/
| elric wrote:
| Meh, not too fond of it. Great concept, but poorly executed.
| E.g. there's automatic people tagging based on faces it
| recognizes, but no way to tag additional people that it missed.
|
| Maybe it will get better in time, but for now it isn't really
| helping me organize my pictures.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I inherited similar boxes of thousands of unorganized photos when
| my mom died. I threw them all away. They weren't meaningful
| enough to her to organize, and they meant even less to me.
|
| My lesson is I don't take photos. I realized long ago that I
| never look at them again.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| I've read lots of bizarre stuff on HN but this one really takes
| the cake.
|
| I'm not even going to argue coz something tells me it's going
| to be futile.
| akaru wrote:
| Bots, or people who think like them.
| dsego wrote:
| I think the vernacular nowadays is NPCs.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There's nothing to argue about. If you like taking pictures
| and enjoy looking at them later that's great. I don't. I have
| maybe 10 photos saved on my phone over several years. I never
| look at old photos or albums. Certainly not going to spend
| tons of time organizing thousands of old photos that I didn't
| even know about and that had just been sitting in boxes for
| 30 years.
| preommr wrote:
| Not OP, but I also don't like taking pictures nor do I ever
| keep any.
|
| I just don't like thinking about the past and the feelings
| they often bring up. Whether that's guilt over not talking to
| relatives that have passed, or the sadness from remembering
| how a good relationship ended badly, or even the good times
| that my current life doesn't allow to continue because people
| have gone their separate ways.
|
| I don't know if it's healthy, maybe, maybe not. But it lets
| me go through the days a bit easier.
| kmoser wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with not wanting to take photos (or keep
| other people's photos around) if that's not your thing. Other
| relatives and descendants who are into family history and
| genealogy might find those photos very interesting, possibly
| even priceless, so instead of doing it for yourself you might
| want to consider doing it for them.
| merlynkline wrote:
| I love taking photos and realised I had this problem so I spent
| some effort setting up a server that delivers a random (biased
| in various ways), labelled photo from my (huge) collection on
| demand via http, with parameters for size etc, and then set up
| some rpi based photo frames (using old monitors) that show a
| random photo every 30s, and similar for desktop background on
| all the computers in the house. Now I feel like I'm familiar
| with all my photos. I also have a simple web-based UI that
| shows the history of the last few dozen photos fetched so if
| one catches my eye I can find it easily, and a way to tag
| photos to include them in the "random" rotation more
| frequently.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I bought Google Photos for my dad, and so often he'd point
| out a picture that it showed him. That encouraged me to get
| it - it's such a simple thing, but getting a 'memory' every
| day is really so sweet.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| If you can, get yourself a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 and a drone.
|
| Completely transformed our catalog of memories. When you weave
| scenery with experiences and people, something magical happens.
|
| Our recent trip to Taiwan: https://youtu.be/7LWxVzZco0A
| rawgabbit wrote:
| I heard a lot of good things about the DJI Osmo and their
| action camera. I have been reluctant as they require you to
| install an app to use their products?
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| No app required; you can bypass the registration of the
| cameras. Drone is a different story; I think you have to
| register that (can't remember).
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Recent models will brick themselves after a few shots if
| you don't do the online registration and activation
| process.
| prawn wrote:
| I have six drones, an Osmo Pocket 2, Insta360 Go 2, GoPro, etc
| but I barely use the pocket cameras because the workflow to
| extract content for day-after story-telling via phone feels
| quite tedious. If you were only going to ingest footage post-
| trip and make a piece (as per the YouTube example), then I
| think it's less painful. A decent phone with good stabilisation
| can handle that though.
|
| That said, two advantages for the Osmo Pocket:
| - footage is not clogging up your phone storage, which can be
| particularly annoying if you are often unable to backup to the
| cloud - it is literally pocket-sized, a nice form-factor
| compared to GoPro, and pretty quick to get out and use.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > A decent phone with good stabilisation can handle that
| though.
|
| The Osmo Pocket 3 has much better low light capabilities
| owning to the built in gimbal compared to even top end phones
| (a couple of good vids on YT comparing them).
|
| The ability to offload to removable SD is huge, especially
| when shooting 4k@120fps.
|
| By the time you add a gimbal and external storage (on
| iPhones, only the highest end phones), that rig is pretty
| unwieldy!
| aikinai wrote:
| That sounds amazing, but how many places can you actually use
| it?
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Surprisingly many.
|
| If the area has a no drone sign, I won't use it. If it has an
| active denial in the app, then it can't be used without
| authorization. I've only run into two of those places while
| at the south of Taiwan (turns out there were power plants
| nearby).
|
| But honestly, the drone is best for remote places to begin
| with, IMO so it tends to work out for my use cases.
| jajko wrote:
| Drones are illegal without prior registration in most tourist
| destination we can reach with small kids in Europe, some of
| them just dont allow them at all. They are extremely obnoxious,
| 1 person recording annoys hundreds of others, pretty selfish
| behavior. They scare wildlife badly so it ends up dying on
| cliffs. No love nor respect for that, quite the opposite.
|
| I've had one of smaller DJI ones, but reality was, when looking
| back, even with simple quick recordings I was annoying to rest
| of the family since it takes a lot of time to set it up, fly,
| and put it back again. I've donated it to Ukraine army cca
| directly when russia started the war, hopefully they did put it
| into good use.
|
| Make great memories, sure, but do it with respect to others and
| laws.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Drones are one of those things that _should_ be something I
| dig...but I never seem to pull the trigger because it seems
| like a big imposition on the other people in the same space
| experiencing the same things you are. Moab was a great example
| of that...we're out hiking on the 2nd or 3rd most popular trail
| and there's the constant wine of a drone _up_there_...you can't
| see it, but it's there, and somebody thought it was okay to use
| it.
|
| Youtube/TokTok/Insta folks are similar. I'm at Mesa Verde and
| this guy is getting cranky because he can't get a picture of
| the sign, because people have the nerve to actually be
| there...and those people get to hear him take the 4th take of
| his intro...."what's up youtube"
| strix_varius wrote:
| This may just be me, but having just finished a large family
| archival project of my own, this sort of video is exactly the
| sort I _wouldn 't_ have included.
|
| The simpler, more candid, more off-the-cuff images and videos
| were gold. A drone by definition has setup and teardown time
| and is impossible to ignore for those being photographed.
|
| Ethically, drones also break Kant's universalizability
| principle.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| To each their own I guess.
|
| The setup and teardown for the newer DJI drones is quite
| miniscule, IMO. Even for the Mini 3 it's no more than 2
| minutes to set up. Usually I'll do it while we are just
| enjoying/taking in a sight. Most of our destinations involve
| hiking so it works perfectly with a break and some rest.
|
| This shot, for example (00:02:04 mark) really captures the
| moment my wife and I were standing alone on this massive
| breakwater in a way that nothing else could:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eixbTpEeVwg&t=124
|
| I don't know how I could otherwise capture the full
| experience of that moment and place in a photograph.
| arscan wrote:
| Great tips in here! And I know this isn't about videos... but,
| don't forget about videos.
|
| I love taking pictures. In particular, candid moment-capturing
| portraits that reveal something about the subject. Also,
| technically challenging ones with really long exposures (eg
| around a campfire), or narrow depth of field (eg of my kids
| playing in the backyard). I like to think I've taken plenty of
| "good" photos of my family over the years.
|
| But something I've found is what I go back to the most are those
| poor quality, poorly edited, silly little videos I take of my
| family just living life. I used to avoid video because the
| outcome was just too hard to control. They would never turn out
| "good".
|
| But flipping through my digital albums now, I wish i took more
| videos. A poor video can capture a lot... maybe even more than a
| great picture. So I find myself taking a lot more videos now.
| prismatix wrote:
| I gave my daughter a toy camera around age 2.5 or 3 and didn't
| realize it also captured video. She had unintentionally
| discovered the video function and has since captured many
| conversations, photos of our old house, videos of car rides,
| and loving moments between our family.
|
| She's had it for almost 3 years now and it's been one of her
| longest lasting toys and is, without a doubt, the most
| meaningful. It gives "seeing the world through her eyes" a
| whole new meaning.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| That's absolutely beautiful! It will be so priceless for her
| when she grows up...
| _tom_ wrote:
| I suggest backing it up in multiple places.
|
| Electronic forms are so much less durable than physical.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| What kind of toy camera?
| aaronax wrote:
| I do an annual one-take video around the house with the family,
| just talking about what has changed. Open cabinets and show
| what is in them. Talk about what is going on that week and what
| you are looking forward to. It usually goes for 20-30 minutes.
| kmoser wrote:
| Those videos are destined to be pure family nostalgia gold. I
| hope you're saving them in a format that can be easily backed
| up and shared with family members, both present and future.
|
| I also suggest taking a few candid snapshots and putting them
| into a book at some point. Video is good, but there's
| something special about a physical album that you can pass
| down for generations. If you distribute several copies of the
| books to various relatives, I'd be willing to bet they'll
| outlast the videos in the long run.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| I think that photos give you a freezing feeling of a moment and
| that's what makes them so vital to a person
| arscan wrote:
| I agree, a frozen moment in time is special. But it also
| doesn't quite capture subtleties that require the time
| dimension... e.g.; a quirky speech pattern that was a
| constant for a year or two but then just disappeared.
| julianpye wrote:
| There are two categories of family photos:
|
| 1) Photos you look at when the subjects are still alive
|
| 2) Photos that you remember people by and cherish people for
| 1 = are all the typical family group pics, lots of posing
| 2 = the photos where the subjects may not even know that they are
| being photographed, while doing the things they are cherished for
| by others. Sometimes they might not even like the presented
| actvities, but everyone else around them appreciates it .
| - Photos of people repairing their family's gadgets -
| Photos of people doing mundane tasks, ironing their clothes,
| cooking dinner for everyone, being exhausted, reading to
| others... - This is what prevails while people are
| still alive who remember you. What you will be remembered by.
| Mostly what you did for other people and how people observed you.
|
| Take photos of your parents and loved relatives during daily life
| and their tasks. You will be far more moved and inspired by these
| pics, than by typical family group photos.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Agree, but the other part of the advice I think is important
| and maybe even not fully explained in this blog post. Taking
| great photos is about using great light, this matters more than
| composition (you can crop in post) in my opinion. Rule of
| thirds is just a guideline, not a rule, if you've got great
| light and an interesting subject I couldn't care less where
| those thirds lines sit. I mostly shoot on an old hassleblad
| with 6x6 square negatives and I often frame my shots with my
| subjects in the middle of the frame.
|
| I have also done what the OP is describing, scanning all my
| family's negatives. I wanted to devote the amount of time it
| takes me to scan and color correct a frame to a scant few of
| the images. My family liked to take "snaps" of places and
| vacations (think non-descript cornfields or national park
| visitor centers) and hostage photos of the kids clearly taken
| against our will.
|
| I taught myself how to shoot on film to learn what I was doing,
| but going to the community darkrooom was the real education. I
| learned how good photographers used the light and saw the world
| by watching them develop and seeing the end product.
| Photography is just like any other endeavor, you get out of it
| what you put into it. For your kids and your kids kids, don't
| just put into it some AI-computationally adjusted selfies and
| snaps of the tops of kids heads. Put some effort in, figure out
| what good light is, and take candid photos.
| j4coh wrote:
| Might depend on your personality a bit. Basically all my
| favorite photos of lost relatives and friends were taken on
| awful cameras by people with no knowledge of lighting or
| composition for that matter. The photos (to me) are valuable
| for a wholly different reason, it never even occurred to me
| until this moment that they were probably bad photographers.
| lukan wrote:
| Yup, the best pictures I have, are those snapshots of real
| life action. Not the super prepared professional ones
| requiring set up (we also have those, my sister is a
| photographer).
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Agree, I strongly dislike the staged, hostage photos.
| Almost no one looks like they are having fun.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Isn't the sign of a professional that they don't need
| that setup?
|
| I have some friends that seem able to snap these perfect
| moments effortlessly.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Isn't the sign of a professional that they don't need
| that setup?
|
| A professional should be able to get good results without
| it, but also when you are a professional, the incremental
| benefit of having the equipment available and using it
| where appropriate is more than worthwhile.
| lukan wrote:
| Ah no, I was talking about my own pictures. Some of the
| staged pictures my sister make of us, are nice as well,
| but overall I much prefer the blurry snapshot or video of
| a nice scene.
|
| (But then again, my sister especially recommended to me
| to choose my partner as she would look very good on
| pictures, I replied I have other priorities, but ended up
| with her anyway)
| close04 wrote:
| > and take candid photos
|
| This is probably the best way to get a good photo regarding
| _the people_ in it. Composition, lighting are important as
| far as they make the picture "readable" if what you're
| looking for is the memory of the person. You'll still look
| kindly on a dark, blurry photo of a very authentic moment
| rather than an exceptionally well composed photo that's so
| staged you can't match it against the person you knew.
|
| Staged photos aren't all bad, they're just usually
| unrealistic if you knew the people. Many group photos have a
| bunch of upright poses and stiff faces that maybe those
| people never had naturally. So you recognize the face but not
| the person, it's not the memory of them you would keep.
|
| If you want to capture the memory of a person, take photos of
| them doing whatever they were usually doing, with their usual
| expression, lighting and composition be damned.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Without going into the 50 different things that go into a
| good photo, where you position yourself and the light are
| important. Being technically sound (correct exposure, depth
| of field) is the floor, then where the light is coming
| from, its quality and feel, there is a ton that goes into
| this. This is why Garry Winogrand's street photography
| looks so much more powerful than some random person's
| photos walking around with a point and shoot.
|
| I agree with you, I basically never take the staged photos
| (don't have a self timer on my cameras anyway) but just
| snapping the shutter when people are doing things isn't
| enough. I have boxes and boxes of photos of my family that
| I'm not even spending the time to scan and color correct
| because it's not worth it. The great ones combine good
| light, technically correct, and an interesting subject.
| close04 wrote:
| > This is why Garry Winogrand's street photography looks
| so much more powerful
|
| You're just on a different, more professional rail.
| Talking about professionals doing professional stuff. You
| don't warm your tires before you go for a drive just
| because that's why F1 cars have so much more grip in slow
| corners.
|
| Capturing the perfect moment in the perfect technical
| conditions is perfect. But that doesn't happen very often
| in real life with family moments. Most of those perfect
| moments will be absolutely serendipitous and you'll
| capture them however you can. Not a single non-
| photographer looks at the snapshot of the perfect moment
| and thinks "different ISO would have been so much better,
| and look at those harsh shadows".
|
| One of the photos most dear to me and my entire family
| was taken at the light of a low-power infrared heater.
| Which is to say just enough light to not accidentally
| poke a finger in your eye. The details are only barely
| visible but you can tell who's there, everything is as
| noisy as you can imagine and more, and the brightest
| thing in the picture is the glow in the dark pacifier
| between the 2 figures. And no amount of good lighting
| would have made that picture better without ruining the
| moment.
|
| In fact almost all of the "most memorable" pictures in my
| album are technically crap. Over- or underexposed, crappy
| film stock or digital resolution, bad framing, bad focus,
| motion blur, fringing, the list goes on to tick all the
| mistakes one could possibly make. They're all
| subjectively better than the technically superior shots
| because the moment they captured was better. If you talk
| about family it will always be the moment. If you can
| make it technically good, go for it, it's just icing on
| the cake.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| I think I'm being misinterpreted, probably my fault for
| the way I'm explaining things, I'm trying to be concise
| but I'm passionate about photography so I'm struggling.
|
| I am not a pro, so far from it. I'd be embarrassed to
| even let a pro see my work. I don't want to advocate for
| needing things to be technically perfect, what I was
| advocating for was taking a single class, reading a
| single book, studying a couple blog posts or something.
| The little changes you can pick up can add so much to a
| photo. Say you move a little so the sun isn't behind your
| subjects, or you have the camera out explicitly in the
| winter mornings when the light is streaming into your
| windows and hitting a light curtain over the window...
| you've got yourself a free soft box. Or you've got the
| camera out in the hours before/after sunset and sunrise.
|
| Little changes to behavior, your position, use of light
| that can put the extra thing on a photo that would
| already be great because it was a great moment.
| m463 wrote:
| That's an interesting insight.
|
| I have another probably simplistic insight.
|
| I've gone on vacation and taken photos of the sights. wow, look
| at that beach/mountain/breathtaking view, etc. Later viewing
| them, they are usually kind of dull.
|
| But if you put a friend or family member in the landscape, they
| become 1000x more memorable. keepers. Like your advice, unposed
| and just in the frame can be more powerful than a posed image.
| starwatch wrote:
| I've had the same experience. My new approach is to do a
| mental check to see if I could get the same picture from a
| google search. If not then I get out the camera. That in
| effect compels me to either enjoy the moment, or to include
| people in the photo to make it unique.
| genewitch wrote:
| Pictures of the Grand Canyon. You can see on Google.
| pictures of the grand canyon with my kid in the
| foreground... Pictures of a city nearby. You can find on
| Google pictures of the city nearby from the top of the
| tallest building in the city nearby. No. Out my back door
| if I turn left 10deg more than I normally do I'll quickly
| arrive in a spot no human has stood in for decades. Not in
| a Google search.
|
| I don't want to claim that maybe it's the surroundings that
| are mundane, because I don't find that true. One of my
| favorite films is koyanisqatsi, which is, really, just
| industrial film of earth. As mundane as it gets.
|
| I suppose I cannot fathom this yardstick you describe.
| dageshi wrote:
| I'm going to take a different view on this.
|
| I travelled a lot circa 2008-10 in and around Asia and
| recently I've been uploading all those old travel photos to
| Google Photos simply because every day it randomly pops up
| pictures from a place I once visited.
|
| Even the bad photos I took back then (I didn't have a great
| camera) are way better at keeping those memories alive than I
| would have expected, they may not be the best, but I was
| there and I took them.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| My wife and I started traveling a lot after my younger son
| graduated and post Covid mid 2021 and we even did the
| "digital nomad" thing for a year. We still go somewhere to
| do something around a dozen times a year.
|
| I blog about it. It isn't for anyone else's benefit but
| mine and I doubt I get any traffic to it. It's more of a
| public journal. I pay $5 a month for MicroBlog. Our travel
| season is usually between March and October.
|
| The blog is a much better way to remember trips than just
| static pictures.
| dageshi wrote:
| I'm sure that's true but... I know that I would never
| check that blog again had I written one.
|
| Google photos pops a reminder of somewhere most days for
| me with a photo slideshow of somewhere I've been.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I do that too. But when I'm old and not traveling, having
| a journal would be nice.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Later viewing them, they are usually kind of dull
|
| Yah, I discovered that, too. Now I always try to get a person
| in the picture.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Is there a definition of "live" photographs in photography? I
| think taking photos of people while they're doing something
| makes them "live" in a way
| dsego wrote:
| Candid photos, snapshots, photojournalism.
| bregma wrote:
| Those are photographs. The other kind are portraits.
|
| Incidentally, the word "selfie" used to be an acronym for
| "self-portrait." Now it refers to any kind of portrait
| (posed, but not necessarily of the picture-taker), so it has
| morphed into an acronym for just "portrait".
| alistairSH wrote:
| Other comments cover it as well, but generally, you'll see
| categories like (none are hard and fast, there's overlap,
| etc)...
|
| - portraits = posed photos with a person as subject -
| snapshots / candids = what you describe as "live" photos -
| street = snapshots, but of random people moving about their
| lives (much of photojournalism falls into this category,
| where the photographer is doing street photography at an
| event) - landscapes = photos of the world, where people are
| not the primary subject, often wider angle - wildlife =
| photos of animals, often with a very long telephoto lens -
| macro = "super zoomed in" / close up (technically where the
| subject is equal or larger than the sensor on the camera)
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I've heard them called "candids" or candid shots. The only
| picture I have of my grandfather (who died when my father was
| young) is of him taking out the trash.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I borrowed a couple Annie Liebovitz portrait books from the
| library for inspiration. Lots of good poses in there, rather
| than the standard straight ahead picture.
|
| My favorite is the one of Bruce Springsteen sitting on his
| motorbike. I'm going to try and recreate it.
|
| I've seen various photos of Keith Richards. What's amazing is
| he's not a handsome man, but somehow the photos of him are
| incredible.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Leibovitz, not Liebovitz.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I found a harddisk with a ton of ripped MiniDV footage of the
| kids when they were young. What I value most isn't the kids.
| Sure, they're adorable and I have a ton of snapshots from
| them...but it's things like 'oh, we had that TV then, oh, that
| room still had carpet, man, the trees were really short, oh
| that really annoying noise the parrot makes? He's been doing it
| for more than 20 years.'
|
| It's not the subjects, it's the context that is cherished.
| Lammy wrote:
| I need to do this with the giant pile of Polaroids I found in my
| dad's closet. For me it hasn't been any technical or logistical
| barrier, just an emotional one. I know I need to do it before
| something happens to them that makes me regret waiting, but I
| just haven't had it in me yet even after two years.
|
| > I bought a heavy-duty slide scanner to help me process the
| images. It's a Canon CanoScan 9000F. I like it, in case you're
| shopping for an affordable unit; in particular, I do not loathe
| the built-in software, which sets it apart from other scanners
| I've used.
|
| I hope this is not unwelcome as it is admittedly tangential to
| the actual topic of this post, but this line makes me want to
| throw out an unsolicited recommendation for VueScan from Hamrick
| Software: https://www.hamrick.com/
|
| I am not affiliated with them in any way aside from being an
| extremely happy customer. Easily the most value I've ever gotten
| out of a piece of shareware, perpetually licensed, supporting
| Windows, Mac, _and_ Linux. I got into it to revive a '90s
| scanner whose software wouldn't work at all on modern computers,
| and I've come to prefer it over all OEM software even on my newer
| gear. Truly the great equalizer that makes the hardware features
| the only things which matter.
|
| I currently use it with a Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL (when I want
| CCD+CCFL scanning and/or large-format scanning) and an Epson
| PerfectionV700 (when I want CMOS+LED scanning). It supports the
| film/transparency scanning features of both if you have the
| appropriate expansion lids. Here's a random screenshot from my
| shots folder, not of transparency scanning but it's what I have
| on me. It does have a lot of built-in cleanup options which I use
| with about a 50:50 mix of cleanup in Photoshop CS3. I especially
| like its built-in debayering https://i.imgur.com/xfBwZq8.png
|
| > Include the photographer. I have few pictures of my father,
| because he was always the guy behind the camera. When he did ask
| someone to take a picture it was always posed, such as "Mom and
| Pop standing in front of the Grand Canyon."
|
| In my experience as a frequent traveler of the US West, it's rare
| now to even be asked. For me probably fewer than five times. I
| don't know if people these days feel uncomfortable asking due to
| how damaged and low-trust society has become thanks to those who
| need us all to hate each other so they can stay in charge, or if
| people have just been out of the habit for so long that they
| never had that example and thus don't even think of it.
|
| I've started keeping an eye out for groups of people posing for
| photographs, especially when they are visibly families
| vacationing with kids, and I will ask them if they want a group
| shot if I read them as amenable to it. Some people say no, even
| once in a while aggressively so, but the acceptance rate is
| incredibly high and it makes me happy to be able to give them
| those memories. It probably helps that I am visibly non-
| threatening in a privileged way that society does-but-should-not
| enable, and that I'm usually carrying a chonky mirrorless camera
| on a strap so people are less likely to think I'd steal their
| phone lol
|
| > Even though I spent much of my childhood writing letters, there
| is only one photo of me with a pen in my hand -- and that was
| taken by a friend at summer camp. Yet my friends and family all
| recall me with a book or pen within reach. My father never
| captured that essential part of who I was.
|
| It's interesting to see the way the human mind works here. We
| take photos on vacations and of unique events due to their
| novelty making them feel like something that can't be re-
| experienced, and we don't photograph the day-to-day activities
| because they are so familiar to us while we're in those stages of
| our lives. Turns out it's the other way around: the Grand Canyon
| will always be there, and the people won't :/
|
| > Crop photos closely. My father took a lot of photos of "Mom in
| front of a pretty vista" but in the long run I care more about
| Mom's expression than the expanse of mountains in the background.
| Thanks to iPhoto I can zoom in, but a lot of detail is lost.
|
| These days when we're all digital and not paying per roll of
| film, I take both. Zoom with your feet. It doesn't have to become
| an overwhelming number of photos -- just two. Tying back to my
| earlier comment, when I offer to take a photo for people I
| usually tell them I'm going to take one of the scene and then
| walk forward and take one more. I did this just two weeks ago for
| a very appreciative family at the National Museum of Nuclear
| Science & History at Kirtland AFB. One wide landscape shot of
| them where you can read the building facade and tell where they
| were, and one tight portrait shot of just them :)
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I wish I had more videos of my kids when they were very young.
| That is what they seem to me the most interested in right now.
| larusso wrote:
| I can understand the sentiment not to add extra work of scanning
| pictures of items that have seemingly not changed over the years.
| But I personally find these pictures interesting. I love to look
| at old pictures of say a square or a street and see how much or
| little has changed. I guess it depends on the viewer but I hope
| my kids don't feel the need to dump the hundreds and thousands of
| pictures of things they're not a focus of. But I agree 100% on
| the non staged photo motive part. I took a lot of photos of my
| kids over the years and other people asked me to do the same for
| their kids. With the question why the fotos looked so good. I
| always explained my two secrets. 1. Go down to the same level as
| your kid. Most parents snap pictures of their little ones from
| above. This looks like a screenshot from the eye. The different
| perspective to see a kid how another kid sees it is more
| fascinating. 2. Don't Stage the Fotos. Try to capture interesting
| moments. You may have to lurk or wait. If you know the person
| well you get a feeling when a certain emotion will show on their
| face. That is something a staged photo won't give you. Doing
| group photos like this becomes more and more difficult of course.
| And when kids age they become more and more aware of the camera.
| genewitch wrote:
| My wife and I* scanned 4000+ film prints with an Epson scanner
| I bought in frustration at not finding a well regarded negative
| scanner. It took a weekend. They're untagged except by any
| writing on the film packs or the photos themselves.
|
| It isn't that big of a deal. I'd do it for pay for other people
| if someone absolutely needed it, but it isn't that hard. 100GB
| including the static gallery site I set up, currently in
| glacier and on two NAS.
| wrboyce wrote:
| Too late now I assume, but I use an OpticFilm 8300i and it is
| great (software wise I use VueScan and Lightroom paired with
| Negative Lab Pro).
| genewitch wrote:
| that didn't exist in 2017 when we did these scans - all the
| negative scanners were approaching $5000 or more, and were
| very fiddly and manual. However they did give great output.
| The epson print scanner did great, though, and there was no
| fiddling. Put prints in the top, push a button, collect
| prints from the bottom 15 seconds later, type a
| folder/collection name, repeat the process.
|
| good to see there's a competitive negative scanner in the
| sphere, now!
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| A casual tourist photo can unexpectedly capture fascinating
| layer of history of the place...
| gue-ni wrote:
| I really wish people would stop using medium.com. There is no
| real benefit, it is so easy to host a website and Medium keeps
| paywalling content that other people have written.
| mikewarot wrote:
| If you just start taking photos (with permission) and _keep
| taking them_ eventually your subjects will get used to you being
| there and start acting normally again in most cases. It doesn 't
| cost anything to take photos, except your time, so just keep
| spamming the trigger. Each exposure is a chance at a good photo,
| for the most part.
|
| The thing about family photos that's most important is to have
| THE NAMES of everyone in the photo, not "mom" or "lucy"... actual
| full names, so that someone in a generation or two can actually
| understand who is who. My wife's family had that... but then the
| photos were ripped out of the album, and all context was lost. 8(
|
| As much as possible, I've got every face tagged in my photos so
| sproutlet has something useful when the time comes.
| Pooge wrote:
| > It doesn't cost anything to take photos, except your time, so
| just keep spamming the trigger
|
| This, this, this, and this!!!
|
| My mother is the one that takes the initiative of taking
| pictures of people during events (whether important or just
| small outings). What she has a hard time understanding is that
| you _must_ spam the trigger. She tries to frame the picture
| perfectly, and everyone on their most photogenic faces. Then,
| she takes ONE shot and oh... somebody closed their eyes a bit.
| "Let's go for another one, everyone go back in place!"
|
| What she doesn't understand is that the best and most memorable
| pictures isn't the one where people are smiling straight into
| the camera. It's when people are doing something they enjoy and
| don't even _notice_ the camera and don 't do a perfect model
| pose.
|
| I'm lucky if I delete only 9 of the 10 photos I took!
| wrboyce wrote:
| I've actually found a lot of benefit in the exact opposite. I
| started shooting film which does have a pretty big cost per
| trigger press and it has forced me to consider each shot a
| lot more.
|
| For me, I found having hundreds of photos on my DSLR's SD
| card a daunting task and the raw photos would sit for months
| before I'd get around to reviewing them (if I even bothered
| at all).
|
| Sitting down and spending an evening
| developing/scanning/converting negatives, however, I find
| rather enjoyable.
|
| To each their own; I think the important thing is to find a
| workflow that works for you so you can capture as many
| memories as possible!
| Pooge wrote:
| For most people, taking pictures is done with their
| smartphone - which is good enough, right!
|
| My view is that striving for a perfect shot is counter-
| productive as you will better reminisce the memories by
| having taken a random picture of someone doing a goofy
| thing with a weird face.
|
| I usually take 10 seconds after taking the pictures to
| discard those that don't deserve to be saved. In contrast,
| my mother, who strives for perfect pictures, has _a lot_
| more duplicate pics than I do.
| nstlgia_junkie wrote:
| >eventually your subjects will get used to you being there and
| start acting normally again
|
| This is my issue. Social media has made this much more
| difficult for me, people generally want to look good in all the
| pictures. I never post them anywhere, maybe to a small group
| chat, but still it's the natural instinct many people have when
| they see a camera out.
|
| So I find people getting self-conscious or otherwise
| uncomfortable/annoyed when I try to get candid shots. But I
| know they will appreciate them later, and often do, but it's
| hard to push past this initial reaction.
|
| These threads have been helpful and motivating -- I will try to
| reference them later with family to explain why I'm taking all
| these pictures, and why they shouldn't stress too much about
| how they look.
| spiffotron wrote:
| Does anyone have any recommendations of a site or a self-hosted
| option for uploading photo collections? I'd love to share photos
| of our child with the grandparents but end up just sending the
| odd snap through WhatsApp, it would be nice to make an actual
| collection.
| Bishonen88 wrote:
| Synology NAS with their photos app can do that. I.e. create
| albums and share them with other people
| spiffotron wrote:
| I even have a Synology NAS and for some reason have never
| thought to use it for this
| reddalo wrote:
| I highly suggest Immich [1], it's an open-source and self-host
| alternative for Google Photos. It's still under very active
| development, but I think it's the best out there.
|
| [1] https://immich.app/
| spiffotron wrote:
| This looks really nice
| rsolva wrote:
| Check out ente.io, they offer both hosted and self-hosted.
| ochrist wrote:
| I self-host an instance of Lychee for all my family photos:
| https://lycheeorg.dev/
|
| There are things I really like, e.g. that you can restrict
| access per user.
|
| But there's no comment/chat/discussion facility, so you cannot
| easily get feedback on your photos.
|
| There's also NextCloud, but I think the solutions there are a
| bit more rudimentary. However, if you already use NextCloud (or
| a similar solution like a CMS for example), you could look for
| a plugin. https://nextcloud.com/
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| > Take the best quality photos you can. Your grandchildren will
| appreciate it
|
| Really resonates! Any photo taken could become a priceless window
| into the past for future generations
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I don't know, I never really cared about photos other people
| take, and I neither did I show my photos to other people. When I
| die, there will be nobody left to care about any of the photos I
| took. I guess I'm just not a family type
|
| Strangely, the thought that my porn collection will be dumped is
| more unsettling
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Our photo library currently consists of 300,000 photos. It goes
| back 20 years, and while i would like to say it is curated, the
| sheer amount of photos makes that task pretty much impossible.
|
| We take a lot of photos, both of family/friends/pets, but also
| landscapes and nature, and when curating the photo library, i
| often find myself deleting the landscape photos of 10 years ago.
| We don't need to keep 200+ photos of sunsets. Yes it was a pretty
| sunset, but there are hundreds of those every year, and unless it
| includes photos of our family or something else "special", the
| photo doesn't stand out, and will eventually be a candidate for
| being deleted.
|
| I just finished the years curating, and have deleted almost
| 60,000 photos from the library. Sunsets, blurry photos (that
| doesn't have any other value), screenshots, and lots more.
|
| Eventually i will however have to curate it even more. When our
| kids eventually "inherit" the photo library, they'll most likely
| be overwhelmed by the sheer size of it, and simply discard it. On
| the other hand i don't want to leave them without photos of their
| childhood, and who's to say what matters to them as memories.
| cm2187 wrote:
| If you can code, you can run them by AWS rekognition to do face
| recognition. It works amazingly well (you need a score >98 for
| a match). Where I am impressed is that it is also remarkably
| resilient to faces aging, and in some case identify some
| toddlers from an adult face. In your case if it only goes 20
| years it is maybe less critical, but in my case I have photos
| going back to late XIX century, and good luck guessing who was
| that toddler without a legend!
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Hilariously, Google photos is really bad at this. It's
| decided that my daughter and I are the same person, and
| refuses to let me update this (i keep trying and it keeps
| getting set back to my name).
| austin_y wrote:
| I had a similar experience with Google Photos where it
| merged the "profiles" of my two children. Like you, I tried
| separating them back out manually, with no real success.
| Ultimately, I turned the face identification feature off
| entirely (which has the effect of deleting all of the face
| data), and then turned it back on. It took a day or so for
| Google Photos to start re-indexing the photos in earnest,
| but that fixed the issue for me, and it was less work than
| the manual re-tagging that I had tried before.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Huh, interesting. I'll try that thanks!
| BeetleB wrote:
| Here's how I do it while preserving sanity:
|
| DSLR photos are for art, not memories. I use only my Android
| phone for memories (among other things).
|
| I have a daily job that transfers photos from my phone to my
| PC.
|
| Once a month, I copy all the photos/videos of the previous
| month into a directory. I fire up a simple Flask web app I
| wrote that builds a page showing all the photos/videos that are
| in a directory. Under each photo/video, I have:
|
| - A checkbox on whether I want to keep it
|
| - A textbox for putting a caption. Here I write whatever was
| going on that day (or when I took the photo)
|
| - A field for entering tags (plain text, tags separated by
| commas).
|
| When I hit a button:
|
| - It copies all my selected photos/videos to another directory.
|
| - In a static site generator, it creates entries for each day
| there is a photo/video. It adds rich text (e.g. Markdown) to
| the SSG entry with links to the copied photos/videos, and
| "captions". The tags I had entered apply to the blog entry/day
| (not to the individual photo).
|
| That's it. I'm done.
|
| Separately, I have a daily cron job to build the site, and make
| a new page showing me all entries for today's date (i.e. all
| photos/videos taken on Jan 27th). This way I can see what I was
| doing on this day 4 years ago, etc.
|
| I keep whatever I want. If I go for a monthly book club
| meeting, I take a picture of the building it's in and note down
| what book I read.
|
| It's very manageable. At one point I had a bug and didn't
| update it for several _years_. When I finally got around to
| fixing the bug, it didn 't take long to catch up on that
| backlog.
|
| I don't curate my DSLR photos. No time for that. It's why I
| don't use it for memories.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I second his opinion. No point to take the 15 million's photo of
| the eiffel tower. Loved ones of course. But also the street! What
| I find the most interesting in old family pictures is a window
| into how people I know, or only apart by only one degree of
| separation, lived at a completely different time. What seemed
| mundane at the time is often the most amusing a century later.
| That's also what I like in old movies. Like just the streets of
| Paris in the early 70s look foreign to a modern eye. Hardly any
| traffic, you could park anywhere, hardly any advertising boards.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >No point to take the 15 million's photo of the eiffel tower.
| //
|
| One proviso to this - it's a travel record.
|
| The next picture is a couple standing at the door to an
| apartment... but where is it... 'oh yeah Paris; your mother and
| i visited college friends. Forgot we'd even been there'.
|
| Sure, way better with a person on the frame, but recognisable
| landmarks can still have utility in a photo collection.
|
| I was working through my parent's slides and found pictures of
| St.Marks square -- didn't even know they had been to Italy.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| For capturing memories, try to think about photos in small
| series... Family at a Metro stop Generic Eiffel Tower photo
| Family at Eiffel Tower Family eating a baguette walking down
| a random street Etc.
|
| As you say, they all provide context and often tell more of a
| story than a single candid of the family.
| torbjornbp wrote:
| I'm in the middle of a similar project but using a mirrorless
| camera with a macro lens and a repro stand.
|
| I second most of this, but would like to offer a different
| opinion about triage. In my experience, doing the triage often
| takes as much time as digitizing the slides. "Mindless" mass
| digitization where I just optimize for throughput has been a good
| strategy for the collections I've worked on.
|
| Instead I'm more careful of what I choose to post process after I
| digitization. I haven't been throwing much away yet, I usually
| just don't process the stuff I don't find interesting. Storage is
| cheap these days.
| simmschi wrote:
| These points are also useful for your own photo library. Forget
| about your relatives going through your stuff after you die, that
| doesn't matter. But which of the hundreds of photos you took over
| the past few years would you look at again?
|
| Right, it's the same kind of pictures mentioned in the article.
| Life happening. The kids helping you cooking, mom goofing around,
| the family hiking etc etc.
|
| It's not the landscape, some flowers, fireworks, a beach usually.
| What you care about are people and the moments you spent with
| them.
| z3t4 wrote:
| I wonder what will happen to the photos we take today, if they
| will "bit rot". The HDD and cloud storage wont last forever,
| maybe 20 years if we are lucky, or until someone stops paying the
| monthly fee. Meanwhile these films have lasted for 40+ years.
| jwr wrote:
| There is a related problem, which I hit while scanning family
| archives going back slightly more than 100 years. There is no
| good photo archival software.
|
| If you now rushed to click "reply" to say that yes, of course
| there is, right here, hold your horses. You probably do not
| understand the problem.
|
| Good photo archival software would let me keep my photos in
| formats that will be readable 25 years from now. It must not rely
| on any company being in business or offering any service.
|
| It must support storing the same picture in multiple formats. It
| must support assigning dates to pictures that are not the same as
| the file date nor the EXIF date. It must support assigning
| imprecise dates (just a year, or ideally an interval).
|
| It must support storing multiple files as part of the same
| "image", and I do not mean multiple versions/formats of an image
| here. Examples: front and back of a scanned paper photo, or 24
| scans of a large format picture that are then merged together
| into a resulting stitched image.
|
| All that information must be preserved in ways that will let me
| recover it even without any software (e.g. files in the
| filesystem).
|
| I used many solutions over the years, and got royally screwed by
| most, the most recent one being Apple shutting down Aperture
| (which did most of these things pretty well). I am now close to
| writing my own software.
|
| EDIT: to all those who respond with "just store it as files" --
| yes, of course they should be stored as files. But that's not an
| answer. You do want searchability, nice visual access, and other
| niceties on top of the basic plumbing.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Sounds like you need to store photos in a folder structure.
| That's about as universal as it gets
| DavidPiper wrote:
| This was my first reaction too, but it scratches an itch for
| me as well - I've thought about making a proper photo
| archival system many times and just never got around to
| giving it a shot.
| michaelt wrote:
| My photo archival software is jpegs in a directory called
| 'photos'. Sometimes with subdirectories by date. Backed up
| however I'm backing up my computer.
|
| For true durability, you've got to embrace the lowest common
| denominator.
|
| Those rare features you can only get from Software X will lock
| you into Software X. If you want your archive to outlive
| Software X, you gotta do without them.
| isolli wrote:
| I miss Picasa, in the sense that, when it was discontinued, I
| still had the underlying folder structure to fall back on.
| pathsjs wrote:
| I suggest Mylio: it ticks all the things you required, except
| possibly of `multiple files as part of the same "image"`.
|
| It will store everything locally, keep your folder structure,
| every metadata is inside a sidecar XML, allows for various
| notions of "date" and more.
|
| Not affiliated with them, just a happy user
| jwr wrote:
| > except possibly of `multiple files as part of the same
| "image"`
|
| That's actually a fundamental requirement.
| antgiant wrote:
| Technically, you could do this in Mylio but probably not in
| the way you want.
|
| Mylio stores "Live Photos" as Photo.extension <- the
| "photo" it shows in the interface Photo.xmp <- all the
| metatdata Photo.myb <- everything else
|
| Literally the myb is just a zip of everything else
| associated with the photo. So in the "Live Photo" case that
| would be the associated video file. If you have edited the
| file in Apple photos that also includes the XML Apple uses
| to non destructively perform the edit. As well as a copy of
| the original photo.
|
| In your case you could just manually create the myb file by
| zipping up all the associated extra photos and changing the
| extension. However the interface would only show the single
| main photo.
| smcnally wrote:
| darktable does all of this. It's a complex application like
| Aperture or Light Table. You run it on your own macos, Windows
| or Linux computer. You can write your own software to extend or
| change it. Photos.app does most of this sans the Windows, Linux
| or "write your own" parts.
| inigoalonso wrote:
| You should definitely check out Tropy: https://tropy.org/
|
| It's open-source, so no worries about a company shutting it
| down, and it handles a lot of the stuff you're asking for. It's
| designed for organizing and managing research photos, but it
| has features that fit archival needs pretty well.
|
| Open and future-proof: Metadata is stored in JSON-LD, so even
| if Tropy disappears, your data isn't locked up. It doesn't
| modify your files either, so your originals are safe.
|
| Flexible metadata: You can assign custom dates (even imprecise
| ones like "circa 1920" or a date range) and add other metadata
| fields to fit your needs. It's not tied to EXIF or file
| timestamps, which is a big plus.
|
| Related files: Tropy lets you group multiple images (e.g.,
| front and back of a photo or parts of a large scanned image)
| into a single "item." Relationships are preserved, and you can
| see them all in the same context.
|
| Search and organization: It's way better than just dumping
| files into a folder. You get tags, categories, and a solid
| search interface to make your archive usable.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| I lost all of my photos (along with everything else) when growing
| up, so taking pictures and videos was important to me as I became
| an adult.
|
| I'm 59 now. In the 1990s I started taking VHS videos of family
| events. Sometimes I would walk around "interviewing", sometimes I
| would walk around and try to normally talk to people while
| holding that huge recorder. (That didn't work). I even set it up
| on a tripod and just let the recorder run while my parents and
| others visited.
|
| This past year I've ripped a couple of dozen DVDs out of all of
| those tapes. In the past two weeks I've then ffmpeg'ed them to
| mp4s and loaded on an SD drive and put in a e-picture frame.
|
| Now we have 30-40 hours of "family memory TV" playing constantly
| in our living room. It is one of the most amazing things I've
| done with technology. I can't describe the feeling of looking
| back 30+ years to see folks who are long gone -- or now adults
| with their own kids!
|
| God I'm glad I didn't record all of this on a cell phone or use
| social media. It would have been impossible to have the patience
| and time to scale all of those walled gardens for this project.
|
| Best videos? The "family interview show", where I ask questions
| and everybody performs some kind of art. Wish I'd done one of
| those every year. Second best? Just setting the cam up and
| letting it run. Third place are videos of family members doing
| things that'll never happen again, like watching a sonogram of a
| new baby on the way.
|
| Worst videos? As I know (and knew at the time!), a bunch of
| videos and pictures of things we were looking at that were
| interesting to us at the time but stuff you could find online in
| a couple of seconds. Unless it has audio commentary, it was a
| pointless exercise.
| kowlo wrote:
| Beautiful and inspiring. Can you share the specific e-picture
| frame you mentioned?
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Not the OP, but I've had great experience with Aura
| frames...Costco sells them each year on the run-up to
| Christmas.
| slumberlust wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, this is wholesome.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| "Whereupon, three days after my father formally retired in 1988,
| he died in his sleep."
|
| There's a deep point here about approaching life as it pertains
| to all the things we say we'll do after we retire.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Memento mori
| TwoFerMaggie wrote:
| > I remember Pop telling me how much cheaper Ektachrome was
| (compared to Kodachrome)
|
| gone are the days when ektachromes are considered the cheaper
| options.. now they are one of if not the most expensive 35mm
| format films
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I'm scanning in my family slides and right now I'm scanning in
| when my dad was in the Vietnam war. The shots of the Vietnamese
| and the town are fascinating.
| alekratz wrote:
| there's this wisdom I read a long time ago: "there's millions of
| photos of the Grand Canyon. There's only one or two photos of the
| Grand Canyon with you in it."
| probably_wrong wrote:
| One criticism and one suggestion.
|
| As for "include the photographer": unfortunately the photographer
| (aka me) is usually the only one who reads these articles.
| Whenever I ask someone else to take pictures of me they ask me to
| strike an artificial pose and then take a full-body shot.
| Hopefully one day my nephews will say "we don't know what uncle
| probably_wrong really looked like, but his pictures were great".
|
| As for the suggestion: I stick to the rule "do not make albums
| with more than 36 pictures" which is the number of photos a roll
| of film used to deliver reliably. If you take 300 pictures and
| stick to the top 1% you'll quickly learn which pictures are worth
| keeping. Your friends and family will be silently grateful.
| qq66 wrote:
| My advice? Never take a photo again. Only video. Video is so much
| more powerful for re-experiencing memories.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I've been doing both for the last decade+
|
| I have a daily cron job that shows me the entries for this day
| in past years (i.e. all Jan 27 entries).
|
| Yes, videos are more fun to look at.
|
| But people don't have the patience to watch more than a minute
| or two at a time. They can quickly scan 20-30 images and focus
| on the interesting one(s). But if they see 10 videos, they'll
| start a few, and after a number of seconds start "seeking"
| forward to see if there is something interesting.
|
| Or they'll watch the first 1-2 videos completely, and skip the
| rest.
|
| So take both types!
| moolcool wrote:
| I strongly disagree. Photography can tell stories which videos
| can't (and vice versa).
|
| For example, compare at this image:
| https://i.imgur.com/pmfMUYc.jpeg
|
| To this video containing the same moment:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UdsVO7HaJg
|
| Look at the player's emotion in the image. What he feels in
| that split-second, the look in his eyes, gets lost if you just
| see the video.
|
| Look at the out of focus area. The boys in the top-right
| hugging, the older couple in the older couple in the top-left
| who can't believe their eyes, the other players reacting to the
| home run.
|
| Look at the bat, suspended in mid-air with no motion-blur. The
| object which kicked off the celebration completely frozen in
| time. Everyone in the photo is looking at where the ball went,
| but the player is looking at the bat.
|
| TL;DR: Because it (generally) takes much longer to look at a
| photo than it does to actually create a photo, there's a time
| dilation that goes on. You can freeze a single moment, and then
| take the time later to absorb everything which goes on in it.
| patatino wrote:
| How do you guys organize your photos to give to your kids one
| day? We just have too many photos and videos. I like it, but I
| try to make some form of a library that has the best photos of
| each year/vacation/birthday, etc.
|
| There is no need to see 50 photos of each vacation or birthday,
| but it's nice to see 3-5 and have the ability to dig deeper if
| you want to.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Does anyone have a recommendation for a self-hosted photo app
| that pushes to commercial cloud storage behind the scenes
| intelligently (I.e. I don't want thumbnails stored there etc) and
| which can use a local GPU for person-identification, scene
| identification etc.
| Balgair wrote:
| > Labels matter. Even a few words helped me know when-and-where
| something happened: "1955 Nova Scotia" or my grandfather's name.
| One of the saddest experiences was looking at a family-gathering
| photo from the 50s with several people in it, and having no idea
| who's in it.
|
| Dear lord, yes. My in-laws have just boxes and boxes of photos,
| some going way back into the late 1800s. The old ones are mostly
| people and faces. But we have no idea who these people are. My
| in-laws think they are related to them, otherwise, why would they
| be kept? But not a clue who this person is.
|
| It's terribly sad in a way. My spouse doesn't want to throw it
| all away, it's family history presumably, but we have no idea if
| it'll ever be a history we know.
|
| And so they sit in an attic, waiting for some magical technology
| to rescue it.
|
| Labels matter.
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