Presumably both people took many pictures of many waves that day, but somehow both of them decided that this is the one that is the best from that trip.
As humans we share a similar metric for beauty. I find this idea simultaneously obviously and amazing.
I once stopped my car (in the middle of the city) to take a photo of an old, bright red truck over the crest of a steep hill. The woman who lived in the house I parked in front of asked if it was a class assignment, because several people had apparently stopped that afternoon to do the same. I thought that more beautiful than the photo itself.
Or maybe it says that we all see the beauty around us, but we don't notice everyone else seeing it, too. (More than one person stopped, but only two people knew that.)
Why only two? In fact, several of those who stopped to take the picture were also informed by a neighbour (each time a different one) that others had taken the same picture before.
I would assume the _reason_ the picture is being taken is the primary driver of that bias, and in this case, they're both professional photographers with similarly nice equipment and public portfolios that are involved in creating income for them.
Plus, the picture obscures it, but you can see the waves coming for a good distance. You'd expect two drummers to be on beat without much difficulty.
My dad and another photographer took the same picture of the same bird, a crane, at the same time and the same spot. Ibsaw both of them, and they are exacly the same. Both only discovered that after having run into each other again the same day on a different spot. They had quite a few outings together since then.
Fun fact, over a year later my dad and I had almost the same experience at the same spot shooting geese in flight. Judging by the angle, we were maybe just shy of a half a second or so appart. Maybe we should look at EXIF data to be sure!
Seems this stuff happens more often then people think.
I remember being struck by this when Microsoft Research first started releasing their photosynth technology, some of the demos showed raw flickr dumps for certain large cities, and there were massive clusters of photos around the most famous tourist bits. In fact, the technology somewhat relied on this overlap.
I think rather than "a similar metric for beauty" that the art of taking photos for retouching and posting on the internet for strangers is such a generally stale and predictable form.
I'm a visual artist and I'm so over the standard "internet photographer" look. Who takes pictures of lighthouses? It's so boring.
It's always people in the same
demographic doing it, too. Give me some variety. Formulaic art is uninspiring.
Claiming that only unique or original things are good is toxic to growth and the development of culture.
Saying "who takes pictures of lighthouses" is like saying "who writes their own [editor/operating system/firewall/whatever], there are already dozens of great ones".
People get better by doing, and if they never did anything that had already been done they'd never be any good at all.
Besides, Lighthouses are cool and pictures of them are pleasant.
It's the same demographic that builds an abandonware single user text editor as a hobby that takes the 400th identical photo of a new england lighthouse.
As a middle aged white guy myself (who codes and makes visual art) I am constantly reminding myself of the context in which my creations exist and reminding myself to actually be creative when doing so.
The millionth photo of something out of the Uffizi with an expensive camera and lens are not things I tend to publish. They're vacation photos, not art.
These photos are independent works of art. They take skill to select the angle, to set up your equipment, and to be ready in the moment. They are absolutely art.
A lot of wedding photos look a lot like other wedding photos. That doesn't make them not art or not worthwhile.
Someone trying to exactly recreate a shot may not be art (trying to find exactly where Ansel was, etc.) but can still be a solid technical exercise in developing skills.
This is not that - it's two people creating something new and independently who happened to have similar results.
"Who takes pictures of lighthouses? It's so boring."
Claiming that a particular subject is boring is extremely uninspired. For example, landscape photography is "boring", but aren't Ansel Adams's photos creative and high art? Didn't Van Gogh take landscape painting, a very old subject, and elevate it?
I could just as well claim that taking photos of people is boring - It's been done a billion times before. Reducing a work of art to just the subject seems to miss the point of what art is.
Open both in 2 tabs on a computer, and quickly alternate between the 2 tabs, the 3D effect is quite visible because of the perspective differential :-)
Woah, thanks for this. I've always known about cross eyed 3d it but was never able to make it work... Until I tried that image for a minute or two and then bam, something clicks and my eyes lock in!? And now I have to make an effort to unfocus the merged image. What kind of sorcery is this?
These two exposures surely overlapped, with the known photo probably exposing for tens of milliseconds on either side of the flash, but the lighthouse exposures might not have overlapped at all, yet captured a far more exact slice of time regardless.
The old rule for shooting flash photography was to set a relatively slow sync speed with a shutter & film-based camera to ensure that the flash itself occurred whilst the shutter was open, and when the shutter was fully open. So the precise timing of the flash needn't coincide with the moment captured on film.
A focal-plane shutter actually consists of two "curtains", front and rear, which expose the film in a slot at high speeds. Below a sufficiently slow speed, the shutter is fully open for a period of time, which is what is necessary for flash photography.
Shooting either unsyncronised (shutter opens or closes before flash fires), or at too high a speed where the entire frame isn't exposed at once results in a partially-exposed shot (example in the first image in the Wikipedia article below).
That was usually 1/60th of a second, or slower, and some interesting effects can be had when shooting with a flash, or multiple flashes, on a scene that's otherwise lit. It's also possible to sync the flash to the beginning or end of a long(er) exposure, which has the effect of either capturing the beginning or ending of a movement sequence. Rear-curtain sync is popular and shows the subject moving toward its final position which is fully illuminated by the flash.
The two cameras in the Japanese photo (the one capturing the flash of the other, which you show, and the image taken by the camera with the visible flash) likely occurred within 1/60th of a second of one another, but might differ in exposure start/end by as much as twice that interval, or 1/30th of a second. What we can be reasonably certain of is that when the flash fired, both shutters were open, but that's a relatively long period, photographically, at 16.7 1/1000ths of a second.
Some modern phones, and possibly smartphone cameras, may have a faster effective flash synch, particularly if they use an electronic shutter.
The two "simultaneous" images are the one linked, and presumably the one taken by the woman whose camera flash is seen fully illuminated in the first picture, though as I've described, there might actually be a considerable difference the moments exposed due to flash sync speeds.
I’ve used this technique since I was a kid, and have always been fascinated with how my eyes perceive both a 3d image and simultaneously two separate images overlaid.
It’s something I think about many times per day - I mean, I’m looking at stuff all day, and this is such a fundamental aspect of the experience of looking at something. But my impression is that most people are only barely aware of how this works?
I could hold of for a few seconds, but my eyes kept rejecting the image. It's like they somehow knew that they were more than the usual spacing apart (if that matters, for stereoscopic images?)
Mine gets better at arm's length on my phone, but my visual focal distances are funky because I have 3 dipoters of difference between my corrective lenses. All I can suggest is "try moving back and forth and see what works."
nope it doesn't matter. It is known to cause motion sickness in VR, but as for viewing photos, any amount of separation works as long as the subject and details have a relatively narrow angle opposing each other all the way from the bottom to the top. The very close waves for example are probably simply too far apart compared to the waves in the background, but everything else is great in this set of photos.
I also can't control my eyes directly, but I can implicitly control them somewhat by deciding what to look at.
For parallel viewing, try focusing your eyes on some object in the distance while still focusing your brain, not your eyes, on the image in front of you. It can take some hours of trying if it is your first time.
I find cross-eyed viewing much easier. For cross-eyed viewing, try to focus your eyes on your nose, and then slowly try to focus your brain on the image in front of you, just like when trying look at something in the corner of your eye without side-eying. At the start, this might mean that you see two versions of the image far apart from each other. While focusing your brain on those images, try slowly focusing your eyes a bit more in front of your nose until the images perfectly overlap.
The depth and detail that you experience when viewing these images stereoscopically is incredible… and then to consider that the shutters were not synchronised, that this was a complete fluke is just wild.
Think of it this way: you run a website that displays photos in chronological order. You receive these two photos. Which picture was taken first? How can you tell?
I've looked at user telemetry and the conclusion I've come to is that the only time you can trust is from systems under your control (i.e., submission time).
That's not an example of a distributed system, so it doesn't really clear up whatever the GP was trying to say about time in distributed systems at small scales.
But even if it was this is nonsensical. The visual content of a photo is generally not what is used to determine the moment in time when it was captured. There's metadata in the image format that specifies when the photo was taken.
There are pictures taken at almost the same moment in time all the time around the world, and there are many pictures taken of the same place, what's special about the situation here is that both of those things happened, and the subject isn't hyper famous, and it isn't a static object, so the chances of it happening were very low.
The distributed part is the clocks on the cameras across the world. The article discusses the timestamp is included in the exif data embedded in the jpeg file.
The clocks are most likely synchronized based on gps assuming they’re already pulling location data from the satellites, the time is “free”. However, the precision of the clocks is not specified and like any process is subject to error. So at the small timeframes here (sub millisecond), you are potentially within the margin of error. When the error bars of several measurements from distributed parts of your system overlap, how do you determine an ordering between them?
Whoever arrives first? Since they can't arrive at the same time because of sequential processing at the final step. So the guy who implemented the system will be the arbiter of truth.
This is a fascinating article that covers something I've thought about plenty of times! Genuinely how often do people take virtually the same photo at the same time? You'd think it'd be more often at places like Disney World but it's fascinating to hear it happened in a scenario like this.
I met First Wife at a festival. I sent my brother a photo of her from the day I met her. He sent back a near-identical photo of exactly the same woman in exactly the same position from the day before when he had been at the festival himself and took a photo of her lol.
One that I sometimes think about is; how often you end up in other peoples photos? I wish there was an option in e.g. Google Photos where you could share (anonymously?) your photos with people you just happen captured by accident.
We participate in a glo-riders bike ride, so 150-200 bikes/scooters all with various levels of led lights from a strip on your helmet to 500+ synced to a speaker. A bunch of people have Bluetooth speakers playing the playlist of the ride.
It's not super well known, so random pedistrians or people at outdoor tables star and record the parade on their phones, so there's multiple videos of us all around town.
The main benefit of photography is not generating a beautiful or popular image, but teaching you how to really see the world, not just look at it in passing, or have it be the unseen background for an unregarded life.
There would be two copyright holders, one for each image.
Even if they left the lens caps on and both images were black on black, there would be two distinguishable images with e.g.: different exif data, sensor noise, etc.
The scene is not subject to copyright (naturally occurring).
If we pretend that camera sensor captures are exactly the same, then I guess it does not belong to a single photographer in this case. But usually no one cares about sensor data, people care about "deliverables", like JPEGs or printed versions, and they will not be the same because everything after sensor capture would be different for each photographer.
> Why would anyone think that was "subject to copyright"?
Because it is subject to copyright in some countries. In France, for example, photographs of certain buildings cannot be published without the permission of the rights owner.
The question was whether a scene can be subject to copyright and I answered that question. Whoever downvoted it probably doesn't get basic aspects of photography
If I am the photographer and I set up decorations, lights etc. then the scene itself is my creative work. The other guy will have trouble claiming any copyright over his photo of the same scene because it is based on my creative work.
Not in this case because the scene is naturally occurring. So we can move on to other things that make the final photo like sensor capture and processing
> Why would anyone think that was "subject to copyright"?
Scene itself is absolutely ""subject to copyright"" in many cases, like when it's set up by photographer or includes recognizable people (they can sue you if you sell a street shot with their face)
I don't get what's so fascinating here to be honest. There's only 1000 milliseconds in second guys. Imagine how many pictures are taken at the same time in a music concert for example.
1) I remember reading this the first time around, amazing article and analysis
2) dpreview is my go-to website for camera information (as gsmarena is for cellphones)
I'm surprised that the exif data was accurate to the millisecond. Quartz clocks won't typically maintain that precision over the course of a single day.
Being 28 meters apart makes a maximum 93 nanoseconds difference in time between the light reaching each other
The article says "same millisecond", not "same moment". +/- 93 nanoseconds makes no real difference to the resulting image, the photos were likely thousands of nanoseconds apart
edit: not to mention photographs don't capture a precise moment in time but a window of time, in this case one of them captured 1ms of time and the other 0.625ms, and those windows overlapped almost entirely
Presumably both people took many pictures of many waves that day, but somehow both of them decided that this is the one that is the best from that trip.
As humans we share a similar metric for beauty. I find this idea simultaneously obviously and amazing.