Digital editing and photojournalism

The 2013 World Press Photo Award was given to Paul Hansen for this photo.

What you're seeing there is not the RAW photo, though, but one that has been touched up digitally. This invited criticism from some other photographers who are wary of the role of digital editing in the sphere of photojournalism. 

One of the leading firms in the area of digital darkroom services is 10b Photography, profiled in this overview of the controversy surrounding the Hansen photo. 

Photographers upload 50 to 100 images a day onto 10b's server. Palmisano begins by making automatic corrections to the photos on his computer, a process in which he hardly pays any attention to the image itself.

Then the detailed work begins. He darkens areas along the upper edge of one image to draw the viewer's eye toward the lower part. In a photo depicting a soldier in the foreground, he carefully and manually enhances the gun. In another photo, he makes the shocking and luminous red of a bleeding wound seem less glaring. The supposed original, he says, would simply not have corresponded to our expectations of what blood looks like.

Within reason, I'm not overly concerned about changes to saturation or lighting since our perception of that and the device's recording of that are all relative anyhow. Ansel Adams did a ton of dodging and burning for his black and white nature photographs, he just did it chemically rather than digitally. I edit most my photos before putting them online, and almost always my efforts are towards capturing the emotion from a moment.

Changing a color completely, however, or removing items from a photo, or changing the shape of a person for a fashion cover, those are edits that move from the realm of your basic digital darkroom processing into something more akin to fiction writing.

Returning to the Hansen photo, it does appear that the faces of the five to seven men closest to the camera are unusually well lit given no apparent light source coming from behind the camera (note that the bodies of the children appear to be in shadow that doesn't seem to affect the men's faces). So it does feel a bit unnatural as a photo. Without looking at the RAW photo, it's hard to say how much those faces might have been brightened in post, but perhaps in the future the before and after will always be available so people can judge for themselves the degree of manipulation.

It's also important to realize that digital cameras that have a wide latitude often shoot a very flat RAW image or "negative" that looks really dull and washed out and that post-processing is almost always necessary to achieve a higher contrast image for final presentation. The flat negative is often a good sign, indicating that there is room for such manipulation, and so I expect a certain amount of post processing work on almost all digital images.

Face facts

I still remember the first time I encountered the teachings of Paul Ekman, through a Malcolm Gladwell article titled The Naked Face in The New Yorker.  The idea was compelling: the human face, through a series of involuntary micro-expressions, revealed underlying emotions in a universal manner, across people of all races and backgrounds.

I briefly considered sending away for a Facial Action Coding System training kit which, at the time, was hundreds of dollars (training tools are available for much cheaper now). I thought it would turn me into some human lie detector, a monster at the poker table. Ekman's system even inspired a TV show, and he has consulted with a whole slew of government agencies, from the CIA and FBI to the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA.

But now, decades after the theory rose to prominence, it has come under fire. Lisa Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern, has challenged Ekman's findings and theory.

She returned to those famous cross-cultural studies that had launched Ekman’s career—and found that they were less than watertight. The problem was the options that Ekman had given his subjects when asking them to identify the emotions shown on the faces they were presented with. Those options, Barrett discovered, had limited the ways in which people allowed themselves to think.

Barrett explained the problem to me this way: “I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.”

More importantly... 

That, Barrett told me, is what the mind does with emotions. Just as that first picture of the bee actually wasn’t a picture of a bee for me until I taught myself that it was, my emotions aren’t actually emotions until I’ve taught myself to think of them that way. Without that, I have only a meaningless mishmash of information about what I’m feeling. In other words, as Barrett put it to me, emotion isn’t a simple reflex or a bodily state that’s hard-wired into our DNA, and it’s certainly not universally expressed. It’s a contingent act of perception that makes sense of the information coming in from the world around you, how your body is feeling in the moment, and everything you’ve ever been taught to understand as emotion. Culture to culture, person to person even, it’s never quite the same. What’s felt as sadness in one person might as easily be felt as weariness in another, or frustration in someone else.

So there’s no such thing as a basic emotion? It sounds crazy. But this is where all sorts of brain science is headed. Researchers once assumed that the brain stored specific memories, but now they’ve realized that there is no such stash to be found. Memories, the new science suggests, are actually reconstructed anew every time we access them, and appear to us a little differently each time, depending on what’s happened since. Vision works in a similar way. The brain, it turns out, doesn’t consciously process every single piece of information that comes its way. Think of how impossibly distracting the regular act of blinking would be if it did. Instead, it pays attention to what you need to pay attention to, then raids your memory stores to fill in the blanks.

The idea that emotion is a human construction, if true, is hugely important. It opens the possibility that people can teach themselves to react differently to different situations by teaching yourself to process your bodily feelings in specific ways. If emotion comes in the interpretation and not directly from physical reaction, there is a gap between the two in which you can choose the emotional outcome.  

This may be why some people react differently to different situations like adversity. Perhaps their bodies feel it the same way, but one person chooses a different emotional manifestation or outcome than the other.

Of course, even before I read the article on Barrett, I had heard of a theory that indirectly challenged Ekman's theories in a more populist manner. Yes, I'm referring to the phenomenon forever to be known as Bitchy Resting Face.  What you read as bitchiness might merely be the default facial expression when a person is feeling no emotion in particular.

How deep the rabbit hole goes

Once you start to understand how our modern devices work and how they're created, it's impossible to not be dizzy about the depth of everything that's involved, and to not be in awe about the fact that they work at all, when Murphy's law says that they simply shouldn't possibly work.

For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That is a great success of technology: all those layers of complexity are entirely hidden and people can use them without even knowing that they exist at all. That is the reason why many people can find computers so frustrating to use: there are so many things that can possibly go wrong that some of them inevitably will, but the complexity goes so deep that it's impossible for most users to be able to do anything about any error.

That is also why it's so hard for technologists and non-technologists to communicate together: technologists know too much about too many layers and non-technologists know too little about too few layers to be able to establish effective direct communication. The gap is so large that it's not even possible any more to have a single person be an intermediate between those two groups, and that's why e.g. we end up with those convoluted technical support call centers and their multiple tiers. Without such deep support structures, you end up with the frustrating situation that we see when end users have access to a bug database that is directly used by engineers: neither the end users nor the engineers get the information that they need to accomplish their goals.

I had this article open in a browser tab for weeks and finally read it. I can't even remember how I found it anymore, but I enjoyed it.

Finally, last but not least, that is why our patent system is broken: technology has done such an amazing job at hiding its complexity that the people regulating and running the patent system are barely even aware of the complexity of what they're regulating and running.

People writing technical patents don't make life easy on the USPTO (have you ever tried to read a software patent?), but the point above still holds. The poor person at teh USPTO trying to figure out whether to approve a technology patent probably doesn't have enough domain knowledge to determine what they're approving and why.

There should be a Tumblr, incidentally, where people take long, complicated, verbose technology patents and translate them into a single paragraph of human readable prose.

The science of hoarding

CAROL MATHEWS OF UCSF has been leading research into hoarders’ cognitive patterns. She and others have conducted functional-MRI studies that attempt to mimic the emotional decision making associated with hoarding: sorting, categorizing, thinking about discarding personal items. In these studies, people with hoarding disorder show increased brain activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a region of the brain associated with decision making, when they’re making choices related to material things. The extra “lighting up” of the region, scientists say, is due to greater emotional engagement with belongings. And more effort than normal is needed to complete a simple organizational task. A 2012 study from Hartford Hospital has also shown that when compared with people without hoarding tendencies, hoarders experience more activity in the anterior cingulate cortex—another brain area involved in decision making—when dealing with their own possessions, and less when thinking about other people’s things. In other words: It’s tougher for hoarders to clean up their own stuff.

Lots of other interesting observations about hoarding within the piece.

I used to hoard a few things, mostly magazines, issues of The New Yorker. I still have a bad habit of hoarding browser tabs, and my DVD collection is large and almost more of a museum exhibit given its lack of use.

The world is changing in ways that have started to cure me of such behavior. As a subscriber to The New Yorker, I can access the entire archive of The New Yorker forever, so nowadays I receive paper issues mainly because The New Yorker doesn't offer a digital-only subscription. What matters to me now is not individual issues but the ability to bookmark articles I want to go back and read when I have more time. 

In a world where you can get almost anything on demand, a car, a movie, an album, a book, and often in digital form, the benefits of ownership for physical goods seem increasingly paltry in comparison to the costs of storing and moving those items.

Increasingly, wealth may best be represented by those people who own the least and can afford to summon items on demand — an Uber car, a movie from iTunes, an article from behind a paywall, a NetJet.

Instant gratification, with no ownership responsibilities. I wonder what part of the brain that lights up? 

Back from France

I'm back from a weeklong trip to France for Eden's bachelor party, though it ended up being more of vacation than debauchery. The most action Eden saw all week was the pat-down he received from TSA at SFO on the way out after bypassing the millimeter wave scanner. It was so thorough he almost needed a cigarette after it was done.

Getting online proved more difficult than I'd imagined, apologies for the radio silence here. I traveled lighter than usual, it was my first time on a trip without my SLR and lens kit and my laptop and charger. It proved quite liberating, but I was less connected and less eager to type or even connect to the grid than is normal for a vacation.

Whenever we did get online, usually through some free but painfully slow wifi at the hotel, I'd toss a few of my iPhone pics on Instagram or Facebook to let people know we were alive. This proved more important than usual given that we flew out of SFO the same day the Asiana flight 214 crash-landed and given that we took a train into Paris the same day a train derailed in Bretigny-Sur-Orge, just outside Paris, killing six. Friends and family sent lots of check-in texts and emails to make sure we were okay, but we'd receive them in pulses. We didn't learn about the train crash until we'd checked into the hotel at Paris and our phone suddenly chirped out a burst of "Are you okay?" texts.

It was good to get away, and it's good to be home. Back to work, and back to your regular programming here. 

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In the abbey at Mont St-Michel