so there are three cameras on the back
of the iphone 13 pro the main camera the
ultra wide and the telephoto so this one
down here at the bottom this is the main
camera so if you cover it with your
finger you can see the frame goes dark
makes sense if you cover the other two
nothing happens now when you hit that 3x
button to zoom into 3x it's supposed to
switch to that telephoto camera right
but sometimes when you zoom into 3x and
then cover the main camera it still goes
dark
why this is because the iphone's camera
thinks it knows better than you
and it usually does basically in certain
conditions especially with lower light
you could get a worse photo out of
actually switching to the telephoto
camera which is a smaller sensor with a
smaller aperture that lets in less light
and can be more noisy so sometimes when
you hit that 3x it just crops in on the
main big camera and doesn't even tell
you
and that's actually going to give you a
better photo see smartphone cameras are
smart but something i've been thinking a
lot about lately is they've gone past
smart they're
bending reality so i'm in the middle of
running the blind smartphone camera test
over on instagram right now if you
haven't already gotten in and start
voting on those you should do it it's a
fascinating experiment every time but a
thought i've had is maybe it's not just
the brightest photo that's going to win
every single time so i actually think
that similar to how in this tech bubble
we underestimate how many people put
cases on their phones at least i do
there's also a bit of an underestimation
of how many people want to just be able
to take a photo and post it with zero
edits now that's kind of crazy in the
tech world or in the photography world
we want the more neutral photo the one
with more information and that's the
better photo to us because then we can
go take it and edit it and make it
exactly how we want because we want that
control but to most people if they can
just take their phone and point and
shoot and the photo that comes out of
that is perfectly good enough to post
with no edits at all that to them
is a great camera
and now you're letting of course the
camera do all of the editing for you
which means you have the least amount of
control over the final look now the
danger of giving up all the control is
our photos become a product of someone
else's vision technically and this is
where it starts to get crazy because
every smartphone company sees things a
little differently right we already know
a pixel photo looks different from an
iphone photo which looks different from
huawei phones which look different from
xiaomi shots every picture
is the result of an image processing
pipeline that is tuned by people and
that is a reflection of their biases and
their skills and what they think we want
which means every photo we take even if
it's of the same thing
will be slightly different just
depending on what camera you take it
with which one is real which one is the
most accurate
maybe it doesn't matter in 2019 the
huawei p30 pro came out it had a pretty
solid set of cameras it was a flagship
phone of course so people went out and
tested its limits and pretty quickly
something sort of fishy came up so when
you went outside at night and pointed
the new periscope zoom camera at the
moon and zoomed all the way in
the camera would recognize the moon and
suggest you turn moon mode on and people
started doing this and posting their
results and everyone's pictures of the
moon looked surprisingly similar now
maybe i should be shocked i mean we're
all taking pictures of the same moon but
have you ever tried to take a picture of
the moon with your camera on your phone
it's usually just a blob it never looks
that good and these all looked really
good maybe a little too good and that's
what android authority concluded with
enough samples they believe that huawei
is using ai to not just recognize that
you're taking a picture of the moon but
also to then superimpose a stored image
of the moon and merge it onto your photo
now first glance that's pretty crazy but
that's also kind of clever because the
moon is tidally locked with the earth
meaning one rotation takes the same
amount of time as one orbit so one face
of the moon is always pointing towards
earth so you only see one side of the
moon all the time meaning it's always
going to look the same and you only need
one stored image of the moon to
superimpose over everyone's photos
so maybe that's not so bad but huawei
denied this of course
but the seed was definitely planted and
my take honestly at the time was like
all right well you have this ai mode in
your camera anyway and it's already
recognizing scenes and adjusting things
and changing things to enhance your
photos already
why not add a picture of the moon in
there but it does bring up the question
a totally fair question which is
how far is too far
like people already seem to want the
most finished
version of their photos straight out of
camera and so you're doing edits and
enhancements how far
is too far xiaomi phones we already know
can detect a landscape and make the blue
sky bluer or they'll crank up the green
on the green grass but also some of
these phones from chinese vendors have
very different acceptable levels of body
and face adjustment so this xiaomi mi 11
ultra when you open the selfie camera
has a beauty filter but this isn't just
facial smoothing it literally lets you
move your hairline
changes the shape of your chin and your
nose it can slender up your face it
changes the size of your lips and your
cheeks it can make your eyes bigger or
smaller and you can put makeup on
yourself and it's all just built into
the camera out the box and is totally
normal and accepted kind of reminds me
of uh when there was a sort of a
commercialized version of this when the
galaxy s9 in the united states had a
bixby vision feature to try on makeup
and then you could swap between
different shades of lipstick and blush
and eye shadow and then bixby would give
you a link to buy the actual retail
version of that makeup but really the
most powerful adjustments are the ones
that happen
when you
don't even know it and you didn't even
ask for it they happen in the background
it's the highest level of computational
photography so google's pixel 6 is
always running the main camera at one
shutter speed and the ultrawide camera
at a much faster shutter speed at the
same time so if you take a photo of a
moving person the phone detects the face
realizes if it's blurry it can take a
non-blurry copy from the ultrawide
camera and merge it onto your subject to
keep just the face crisp and clear all
of this happens in the background
without you even asking
there's also already a feature in
facetime on iphones called eye contact
that moves your pupils to make it look
like you're making eye contact with the
camera even though you're not you're
looking at the screen below the camera
but it's pretty eerie and slightly
creepy and it works a little too well
but at least you can turn it off and i
could swear this was a feature somewhere
i must have been imagining a keynote but
i can't find it anywhere so i'm going to
predict that this future will exist at
some point in some phone probably in
something like a pixel first imagine
you're taking a group selfie shot
there's a bunch of people with you you
hit the shutter button
and almost everyone has their face not
blinking and smiling but at different
moments everyone has sort of their ideal
face
so
the software smartly goes through and
merges the best smiling non-blinking
face for everyone in the selfie doesn't
even tell you just does it in the
background we've actually seen versions
of this working our way up to this
feature so believe it or not in 2012 a
nokia lumia phone had a selfie mode
where you'd hold for five seconds and
then after the shot you could scroll
between five different faces of selfies
to pick which one you like the best so
it sounds crazy but that's the thought
i've been having is this is the
direction smartphone cameras are going
which is as computational photography
gets better and better and we're merging
more and more things in
eventually
these cameras are outputting captures of
moments in time that never really
happened so it's easy to see a
future
where smartphone cameras just recognize
all kinds of things like ai mode right
now is pretty basic it'll see a sunset
and make the oranges brighter but maybe
it'll start recognizing all types of
objects
you're uh you're in front of a popular
instagram wall in santa monica somewhere
and it notices you take a picture in
front of it it's like oh i have a
downloaded picture of that in our
database and it just wipes out all the
people in the background and makes you
perfectly flat on that image without you
even asking
that could happen in the future at that
point basically the whole world turns
into
ai recognizable qr codes where your ai
camera is just being triggered by all
sorts of objects and things around you
to morph into recognized situations it
is kind of crazy to think about
but while we're in this new reflective
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take is
i don't have a solution for this eerily
dystopian smartphone camera future but i
wonder are you okay with
smartphone cameras
spitting out finished images that are
further and further from reality they're
basically bending the definition of a
photo
let me know what you think either way
that's been it thanks for watching catch
you guys the next one
peace
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